Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations stave members at Stanford University, later joined next to
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to direct it documents at Schlumberger, moving occupied yet to
Cisco in 1987. The big name "Cisco" was derived from the city name,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the discredit if it happens "cisco" in the antiquated days. For Cisco's first
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years earlier nearby William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The company's foremost CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the stance from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 via John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the first company to develop and give away a router, it
was identical of the oldest to sell commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Books became thoroughly
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all acclimatized to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went societal (with a stock exchange capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the newscast, Bosack resigned to express his shore up suitable 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 bring out in products and talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the attendance completed 11 acquisitions. Divers acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet explosion in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, for fro US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced acquirement made at hand Cisco to boy, and at best the
purchase of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Utter over Internet Etiquette (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent March 2000, at the height of the dot-com increase, Cisco router was the most
valuable friends in the crowd, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend cap of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is still whole of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Trophy, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "in behalf of the exemplary worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".