Wayne Morris Selected as McDATA Senior Vice President of Worldwide Mar

    Business Editors/High-Tech Editors

    BROOMFIELD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 5, 2005--McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq:MCDTA)(Nasdaq:MCDT), the leading provider of storage networking solutions, today announced the appointment of Wayne Morris to senior vice president of worldwide marketing, effective January 1, 2005. Morris will be responsible for enhancing McDATA's marketing communications, strengthening channel relationships, driving preference for McDATA storage networking solutions and increasing McDATA's market share.
    "Wayne's industry experience, vision of marketing and best practices in the technology industry are of tremendous value to McDATA as we grow our business," said John Kelley, chairman, president and CEO, McDATA. "Wayne's appointment reflects our increased focus on marketing in playing a key role in delivering on our short and long term goals for the business."
    McDATA, the leading provider of storage networking technologies, is unique in its ability to provide networking solutions for companies with almost any networking infrastructure, at any stage of their networking evolution, implementing any storage strategy. This independence enables McDATA to solve business problems for the broadest spectrum of enterprises. McDATA realizes companies' storage environments, as well as their business needs, are also unique -- and is the only storage networking vendor capable of offering the flexibility to create solutions that meet this diversity with a vision based on achieving a Global Enterprise Data Center, where companies have access to corporate information, anytime, anywhere.

    About Wayne Morris

    Morris most recently served as CEO of Citect, a global, industrial automation software company headquartered in Australia. He also served as senior vice president of corporate marketing for BMC software for several years, where he was responsible for global field marketing and execution, developing and articulating BMC's market position and overseeing marketing efficiency and effectiveness. Prior to that he served as BMC's Director of Corporate Strategy, responsible for acquisition integration and product/partnership strategy. As an employee of BMC since 1995, Wayne began as a product marketing manager for the company's open systems products.
    As Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Morris received a grant of options to purchase up to 200,000 shares of Class B common stock at an exercise price of $5.63 on January 3, 2005. The options vest 25% each year and were issued under the Company's 2004 Inducement Equity Plan.

    About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

    McDATA (Nasdaq:MCDTA)(Nasdaq:MCDT) is the only vendor today uniquely positioned to deliver a unified information infrastructure -- key to enabling a world where digital data is instantly transformed into useful information, accessed -- anytime, anywhere. With more than 20 years of storage networking experience, McDATA's comprehensive product portfolio enables partners and customers around the world to reduce the total cost of storage management today and be ready to adapt to the real-time information demands of tomorrow. Trusted in the world's largest data centers, McDATA connects more than two-thirds of all the world's networked data, powering the latest e-business applications, customer databases, financial traffic and other mission-critical data.

    Forward-Looking Statements

    This press release contains statements about expected future events that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties. Readers are urged to consider statements that include the terms "believes", "belief", "expects", "plans", "objectives", "estimates", "anticipates", "intends", "targets", or the like to be uncertain and forward-looking. Factors that could cause actual results to differ and vary materially from expectations include, but are not limited to, our relationships with EMC, IBM and HDS and the level of their orders, aggressive price competition by numerous other SAN and IP switch suppliers, OEM qualification of our new products, manufacturing constraints and other risk factors that are disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These cautionary statements by us should not be construed as exhaustive or as any admission regarding the adequacy of disclosures made by us. All cautionary statements should be read as being applicable to all forward-looking statements wherever they appear. We do not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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CONTACT: McDATA Corporation Media: Kathleen Sullivan, 720-558-4435 Cell: 720-480-5501 press.release@mcdata.com or Investors: Renee Lyall, 720-558-4629 renee.lyall@mcdata.com

KEYWORD: COLORADO Technology_IT INDUSTRY KEYWORD: HARDWARE SOFTWARE NETWORKING MANAGEMENT CHANGES SOURCE: McDATA Corporation

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