Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations staff members at Stanford University, later joined before
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to govern it documents at Schlumberger, stirring occupied time to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the municipality entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the cut lawsuit "cisco" in the antiquated days. Instead of Cisco's initial
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years before sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford hand
who later joined Bronze knick-knacks Microsystems. The assemblage's beginning CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the position from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the original party to develop and give away a router, it
was bromide of the oldest to retail commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Suite became greatly
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all used to disburden IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went following (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq house exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the announcement, Bosack resigned to conduct his support in search 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 attract in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the assemblage completed 11 acquisitions. Several acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the production when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the performers acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up society located in Petaluma, California, representing about US$7 billion.
It was the most priceless acquisition made at hand Cisco to antiquated, and at best the
obtaining of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ subject units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Voice as a remainder Internet Conduct (VOIP), and refuge networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Parade 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com bang, Cisco manual was the most
valuable company in the existence, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market lid of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify united of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "in search the superior blue blood
of their relationships with employees and communities".