Cisco Completes Acquisition of WHIPTAIL

  SAN JOSE, Calif. – Oct. 29, 2013 – Cisco today announced it has completed the acquisition of privately held WHIPTAIL, a leader in high performance, scalable solid state memory systems that enable organizations to simplify physical and virtual data center environments and process more data in less time. WHIPTAIL will strengthen Cisco’s Unified Computing System™ (UCS) strategy and enhance application performance by integrating scalable solid state memory into the UCS’s fabric computing architecture.

With the acquisition of WHIPTAIL Cisco is evolving the UCS architecture by integrating data acceleration capability into the compute layer. Integrating WHIPTAIL’s solid state memory systems into the computing fabric of UCS will simplify customers’ data center environments by delivering the required performance in a fraction of the data center floor space with unified management for provisioning and administration.

WHIPTAIL employees will be integrated into the Computing Systems Product Group led by Paul Perez, vice president and general manager. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $415 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of WHIPTAIL.

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Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the expected benefits to Cisco and its customers from completing the acquisition and plans regarding WHIPTAIL personnel.  Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due to a variety of factors, including, among other things,  the retention of employees of WHIPTAIL and the ability of Cisco to successfully integrate WHIPTAIL and to achieve expected benefits, business and economic conditions and growth trends in the networking industry, customer markets and various geographic regions, global economic conditions and uncertainties in the geopolitical environment and other risk factors set forth in Cisco’s most recent report on Form 10-K.  Any forward-looking statements in this release are based on limited information currently available to Cisco, which is subject to change, and Cisco will not necessarily update the information.