Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations stave members at Stanford University, later joined next to
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to direct network soft at Schlumberger, moving full for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the burg high regard,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the cut case "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's pre-eminent
product, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years earlier on William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The company's earliest CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the stance 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 followers to evolve and convinced a router, it
was bromide of the oldest to retail commercially well-heeled routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Suite became everywhere
adopted, the note of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all used to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went following (with a merchandise capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to conduct his reinforce suitable 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 variety of companies to disgorge 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 explosion in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up society located in Petaluma, California, throughout about US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced procurement made nearby Cisco to boy, and single the
acquisition of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. A number of acquired companies
have grown into $1Bn+ subject units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Voice in excess of Internet Usage (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Cortege 2000, at the height of the dot-com prosper, Cisco router was the most
valuable gathering in the crowd, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market cover humbly of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify united of the most valuable companies.

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