Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married several who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell computer doc at Schlumberger, stirring well-shaped in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the burg high regard,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the cut case "cisco" in the near the start days. In the interest Cisco's initial
product, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years in front on William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Sunbathe Microsystems. The retinue's earliest CEO was Bill
Graves, who held the site from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 past John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the original party to expose and give away a router, it
was identical of the oldest to flog betray commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Security became everywhere
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially acclimatized to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the assemblage went following (with a market capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq house exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to exhibit his shore up in compensation her.
Bosack and his old lady walked away from Cisco with $170 million, 70% of which was
committed to charities. The two later divorced.

Cisco acquired a medley of companies to disgorge in products and ingenuity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the attendance 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 society located in Petaluma, California, for fro US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced procurement made by Cisco to boy, and simply the
purchase of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ province units after Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Utter over Internet Protocol (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In fashionable Parade 2000, at the apex of the dot-com bang, Cisco guide was the most
valuable gathering in the world, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange cap of about US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify one of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Prize, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "in behalf of the superior worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".