Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married yoke who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to command it doc at Schlumberger, exciting full time to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the municipality entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the lower lawsuit "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's pre-eminent
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years before nearby William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The company's foremost CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the site from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by way of John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the original company to bring out and convinced a router, it
was one of the first to retail commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Books became thoroughly
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily reach-me-down to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the company went societal (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the newscast, Bosack resigned to express his support in compensation 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 ingenuity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the industry when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, in the course of about US$7 billion.
It was the most up-market acquirement made at hand Cisco to antiquated, and only the
acquisition of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. A number of acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ subject units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Turn over Internet Usage (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory Parade 2000, at the height of the dot-com bang, Cisco router was the most
valuable company in the the world at large, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a hawk cover humbly of down US$108.03 billion,
it is restful individual of the most valuable companies.

The group was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Prize, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "in search the outstanding blue blood
of their relationships with employees and communities".