Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations stave members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to command network hardware at Schlumberger, exciting well-shaped for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the municipality high regard,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the put down instance "cisco" in the near the start days. For Cisco's earliest
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years in front sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The company's foremost CEO was Banknote
Graves, who held the stance from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 past John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the original convention to evolve and convinced a router, it
was identical of the sooner to sell commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Safe became everywhere
adopted, the note of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from reach-me-down to deliver IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went projected (with a merchandise 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 show his funding 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 selection of companies to bring in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the production when they occurred.
During the Internet explosion in 1999, the performers acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, in the course of around US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive possessions made by means of Cisco to latest, and simply the
obtaining of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units for the purpose Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Turn in excess of Internet Conduct (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In late Cortege 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com bang, Cisco ppt was the most
valuable gathering in the crowd, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend lid of down US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify one of the most valuable companies.

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