SAN ANTONIO and SAN JOSE, Calif. -- SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE:SBC - News) and Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO - News) today announced a new strategic marketing and sales agreement. This relationship is focused on accelerating the delivery of a new class of managed business services, combining Cisco's leading-edge equipment and SBC's state-of-the-art transport and networking services. SBC also plans to use select Cisco technology in its core network infrastructure to deliver emerging services. "Managed services has tremendous growth potential, as businesses look for ways to expand services and adopt new technologies, while also working within increasingly tight capital budgets," said Sandra Palumbo, analyst, telecommunications strategies, The Yankee Group. "The combination of Cisco equipment and SBC's managed services experience could create a compelling outsourcing option." The relationship calls for Cisco to become the preferred provider for specific SBC managed service products, including Internet Protocol (IP) telephony, network and customer premises equipment (CPE)-based IP virtual private networks (IP-VPN), security, storage networking, hosting, and wireless local area networks (WLANS) (see SBC-Cisco Agreement Managed Services Fact Sheet and graphic for details). The managed service products, some of which are available now and others which will be deployed in 2003 and 2004, are designed to help customers maximize returns on existing network investments by enabling consolidation and upgrade of multi-platform networks. These services ultimately will be made available through direct and indirect channels. SBC subsidiaries also plan to use Cisco optical networking, Ethernet transport and network-based IP-VPN technology in their core network infrastructure. This will enable SBC companies to accelerate development and deployment of high-speed networking solutions such as Optical Ethernet and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) in 2003. An SBC company also is using Cisco 12000 Series routers within its national OC-192 IP backbone network, which will be completed in 2003 (see SBC's National Data Strategy fact sheet). Cisco Systems Inc. SBC Communications Inc.