Cisco Updates Professional Network Design Certification

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - July 31, 2007) - To address the growing demand for network professionals who can design and build a service-oriented network architecture, Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced enhancements to the CCDP® professional-level design certification. The revised course and exam help to ensure that Cisco network design professionals remain current with today's increasingly complex network requirements.

Networks no longer merely provide connectivity; increasingly, they embed intelligence to improve business processes and performance. Today's design professional requires the skills to build a service-oriented network architecture that brings application-level intelligence into the network infrastructure. A service-oriented network architecture creates efficiencies in the entire enterprise information technology (IT) environment, enabling higher availability, greater scalability and lower total cost of ownership via better performance from the existing IT infrastructure.

"Gartner is predicting big growth this year for applications designed around a service-oriented architecture, estimating that 50 percent of new mission-critical applications and processes will be SOA-based in 2007, and by 2010 as many as 80 percent of these new initiatives will be designed around SOA," said Roger Beatty, senior manager, Learning and Development at Cisco. "The revised CCDP curriculum and exam will prepare next-generation design professionals to design and implement these intelligent networks."

The revised course is Designing Cisco Network Service Architectures, ARCH v. 2.0; the revised exam is number 642-873. About 90 percent of the course covers new material that is in line with current Cisco products and solutions.

Training and Availability

Authorized Cisco training is available from a global network of Cisco Learning Partners and the Partner Education Connection. For complete details on the Cisco Career Certifications program, visit: www.cisco.com/go/certifications.

The new exam is scheduled to be available at Pearson VUE testing centers as of Oct. 11, 2007.

About Cisco

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Contact Information: Press Contact: Cara Sloman Cisco Systems, Inc. 831-440-2411 csloman@cisco.com