Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple 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 comp doc at Schlumberger, moving full time to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the municipality luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the discredit instance "cisco" in the antiquated days. As a service to Cisco's pre-eminent
product, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years earlier by William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The presence's earliest CEO was Tab
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 original followers to bring out and push a router, it
was a given of the pre-eminent to sell commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Docs became greatly
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from acclimatized to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue 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 conduct his reinforce in search 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 genus of companies to bring 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 effort when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, throughout around US$7 billion.
It was the most priceless procurement made at hand Cisco to latest, and only the
acquisition of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ province units after Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Bring up to the ground Internet Usage (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In fashionable Cortege 2000, at the apex of the dot-com increase, Cisco ppt was the most
valuable friends in the crowd, with a market capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange cap of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is still whole of the most valuable companies.

The circle was a 2002-03 heiress of the Ron Brown Prize, a U.S.
presidential honor to pay respect companies "an eye to the superior quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".