Force10 Networks today announced that it extended its leadership in the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market during the second quarter of 2004, which ended June 30. Force10, the networking industry's leading provider of Layer 3 Ten Gigabit Ethernet ports in the first quarter, continued to expand its market position during the quarter with worldwide customer deployments and technological innovation, in addition to closing the industry's largest funding round in more than two years. "The second quarter marked many important milestones for Force10 as the company closed its mezzanine round of funding, expanded into new vertical industries, continued to develop innovative technology and received prestigious industry recognition for its efforts," said Marc Randall, CEO of Force10 Networks. "On the heels of a tremendous first quarter, the second quarter confirmed that our market share and worldwide customer traction continues to strengthen." Building on its first quarter customer growth, Force10 continued to expand deployments around the world. NTT-ME deployed the Force10 E-Series in a 10 Gigabit Ethernet upgrade to deliver such advanced applications as IP telephony, streaming media and telenetworking. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) also deployed the Force10 E-Series to increase the reliability of its data center, while the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) is leveraging the E-Series as an interconnect between several high performance clusters. According to the most recent Layer 2/Layer 3 Ethernet report from Dell'Oro Group, Force10 led the Layer 3 Ten Gigabit Ethernet market with a 36 percent market share, an increase of nine percent over the previous quarter. Dell'Oro Group estimates project that the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market will reach $2.4 billion by 2008, driven by early volume deployments on high-end modular platforms like the Force10 E-Series in campus backbones, inter-campus connections and large data centers. Further developing its role as a leader in the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market, Force10 closed a $75 million mezzanine round of funding at an increased valuation and with the full participation of all existing investors. Force10 was also named by Red Herring as a private technology company positively transforming the industry's marketplace dynamics through its proven business model, management experience and growing customer base. During the quarter, Force10 introduced the Force10 Management System (FTMS), a flexible graphical management tool that simplifies network management and reduces operating costs. With full management functionality and inventory control features, the FTMS provides the information necessary to ensure predictable network performance. Additionally, Force10 joined Internet2, the university-led networking research and development consortium, to advance next-generation applications and technologies. The Force10 E-Series combines unmatched scalability with best-in-class resiliency to provide a new level of network and application predictability. Leveraging three distinct processing units for switching, routing and management functionality, the Force10 EtherScale architecture enables the E-Series to reliably deliver line-rate Gigabit and 10 Gigabit throughputs across all ports regardless of traffic conditions.