BASEL, Switzerland -- Roche (NYSE:ROC - News), which employs more than 60,000 people and sells its products in over 150 countries, today announced that they will begin a corporate wide program of standardizing their telephony on Cisco IP Telephony solutions. At the same time Roche will discontinue to make major investments in conventional PBX technology. A large IP Telephony installation in Italy with more than 1000 end-users in two separate locations, implemented in less than three months, convinced Roche that IP Telephony would meet their world wide needs for an integrated, reliable solution. Roche had begun deploying Cisco IP Telephony solutions in 2001, at a number of local offices around the globe. Roche's existing global intranet, which spans more than 60 countries and some 310 locations, with data volumes growing by 40% every year, is standardized on Cisco equipment. According to Hans Wilhelm Barz, Global Head of Network Services, Roche has already experienced great advantages in bandwidth, reliability, availability, maintenance and all round improvements across the entire value chain as a result of standardizing globally on Cisco technology. "Conventional telephony is approaching the end of its life cycle and historically has been a local affair with no corporate synergies. We at Roche realized that as a global organization, an IP Telephony solution would be in line with our standardization goals, as well as providing us with some very real benefits." Explained Barz, "Implementing Cisco IP Telephony on a global level will also allow us to integrate other applications such as Softphones, unified Productivity Tools and in the near future standardized and cooperative call center solutions." Cisco Systems Inc.