Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married yoke who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined next to
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to direct comp ppt at Schlumberger, exciting occupied yet to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the see luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the cut lawsuit "cisco" in the antiquated days. In the interest Cisco's pre-eminent
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years earlier sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Sunbathe Microsystems. The retinue's earliest CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the placement from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by way of John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the first convention to expose and push a router, it
was identical of the first to flog betray commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Documents became thoroughly
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all reach-me-down to deliver IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went public (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the announcement, Bosack resigned to exhibit his funding suitable her.
Bosack and his partner walked away from Cisco with $170 million, 70% of which was
committed to charities. The two later divorced.

Cisco acquired a variety of companies to bring out in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the work when they occurred.
During the Internet blast in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, throughout about US$7 billion.
It was the most priceless acquirement made by means of Cisco to boy, and single the
obtaining of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
have grown into $1Bn+ province units for the purpose Cisco, including LAN switching,
Purpose Voice over Internet Conduct (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory March 2000, at the crest of the dot-com prosper, Cisco ios was the most
valuable attendance in the the world at large, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend exceed of on touching US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving whole of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "for the exemplary quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".