Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined before
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell comp documents at Schlumberger, stirring entire for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the burg name,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the discredit case "cisco" in the near the start days. Instead of Cisco's initial
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years in the vanguard sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The assemblage's earliest CEO was Tab
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 basic party to evolve and push a router, it
was identical of the sooner to retail commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Docs became widely
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all used to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the company 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 conduct his support for her.
Bosack and his the missis 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 disgorge in products and proclivity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. Several acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the industry when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the performers acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up society located in Petaluma, California, for on every side US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive acquisition made by Cisco to boy, and single the
obtaining of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. A number of acquired companies
have grown into $1Bn+ province units after Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Voice over Internet Usage (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In late March 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com increase, Cisco vendor was the most
valuable company in the crowd, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend exceed of about US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving whole of the most valuable companies.

The circle was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "for the outstanding quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".