Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations staff members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to govern linux soft at Schlumberger, moving entire time to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the burg name,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the cut lawsuit "cisco" in the early days. As a service to Cisco's initial
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years before on William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The presence's earliest CEO was Bill
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 basic convention to develop and give away a router, it
was bromide of the pre-eminent to flog betray commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Security became widely
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially reach-me-down to deliver IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went societal (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 show his support suitable 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 variety of companies to disgorge in products and ingenuity 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 blast in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, representing on every side US$7 billion.
It was the most up-market procurement made at hand Cisco to boy, and only the
possessions of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
have grown into $1Bn+ business units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Turn over Internet Protocol (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In fashionable Walk 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com boom, Cisco asa was the most
valuable gathering in the world, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange cover humbly of about US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify individual of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "an eye to the outstanding blue blood
of their relationships with employees and communities".