Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations shaft members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell linux ppt at Schlumberger, moving occupied for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the city entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the discredit case "cisco" in the near the start days. Instead of Cisco's first
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years in the vanguard on William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The assemblage's foremost CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the stance from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the first convention to develop and sell a router, it
was identical of the oldest to sell commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Security became thoroughly
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from reach-me-down to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went following (with a market capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq inventory exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to show his reinforce for 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 medley of companies to attract in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. Several acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet prosperity in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, for around US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced acquirement made nearby Cisco to boy, and single the
purchase of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
have grown into $1Bn+ province units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Eagerness Utter over Internet Protocol (VOIP), and refuge networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In fashionable Walk 2000, at the crest of the dot-com increase, Cisco asa was the most
valuable friends in the crowd, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend cover humbly of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify individual of the most valuable companies.

The circle was a 2002-03 receiver of the Ron Brown Trophy, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "for the superior worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".