Foundry Networks Inc announced that research firm the Dell'Oro Group reported that Foundry earned the No. 1 share in the fast-growing 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10-GbE) Layer 3 market for the third quarter of 2004. Dell'Oro's latest quarterly research placed Foundry as the clear leader in Layer 3 10-Gigabit Ethernet with a 45 percent market share of port shipments and a 42.6 percent share of revenue. This is an increase of 35 percent from Q204 for port shipments and 5 percent for revenue.

According to Dell'Oro, Foundry was the No. 1 provider of Layer 3 10-GbE solutions in 2003, and it has led the Layer 3 10-GbE modular category for the last six quarters. Foundry also has maintained the No. 1 position in the Layer 3 10-GbE fixed category since Q204, when it began volume shipments of its new FastIron Edge X-series switches.

Foundry was the first networking company to ship 10-GbE products in October 2001 and now offers the most scalable and diverse line of 10-GbE products in the industry, ranging from network edge to core. Earlier this month, Foundry announced a broad range of industry-leading 10-GbE products, including major scalability and performance enhancements for its award-winning, high-performance BigIron MG8 10-GbE modular switch and new 10-GbE small form factor aggregation, workgroup and stacking switches in the FastIron Edge and EdgeIron product lines. Foundry also announced several new 10-GbE XENPAK optical transceivers including the industry's first modular 10-GbE Wide Area Network Physical Layer (WAN PHY) optical transceiver. The new WAN PHY optic will help accelerate deployments of 10-GbE by enabling high-performance links between Local, Metro and Wide Area Networks (LAN, MAN and WAN) for bandwidth-intensive applications on existing SONET infrastructure. The new products are designed to accelerate mainstream enterprise and service provider adoption of 10-GbE by adding a diverse range of high-performance, highly integrated and flexible solutions to Foundry's product portfolio at industry-leading prices. Foundry also leads the industry with the lowest 10-GbE price per port of $2,500.

Foundry's 10-Gigabit Ethernet products leverage all of the benefits of Ethernet while providing the next level of performance and bandwidth required by today's bandwidth-intensive applications and ever-increasing network traffic. Foundry's 10-Gigabit Ethernet customers include premier enterprise and service provider customers, validating the growing demand for bandwidth in these markets and confirming the performance and cost effectiveness of Foundry's solutions. Hundreds of customers worldwide have deployed Foundry's 10-GbE solutions including the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, BBC Corp, Cardiff University, Florida A&M University, GlobalConnect, Ottawa Hydro Telecom, The Peter Kiewit Institute at the University of Nebraska, Sandia National Laboratories, USC's Information Science Institute, University of Miami, University of Utah, and the U.S. Army.

"Foundry has been leading the adoption of 10-Gigabit Ethernet since 2001 by delivering the industry's most complete and flexible 10-Gigabit Ethernet solutions at compelling price points," said Bobby Johnson, Foundry's chairman and CEO. "Our strategy is to offer the broadest and most diverse portfolio of 10-GbE products for edge, backbone and data centers, providing our customers in both enterprise and service provider environments scalable, flexible, cost-effective 10-GbE solutions."