Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married yoke who worked as computer
operations stave members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to govern linux documents at Schlumberger, exciting full in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the municipality entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the put down instance "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's first
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years before sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The assemblage's foremost CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the placement 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 party to evolve and push a router, it
was bromide of the first to retail commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Safe became everywhere
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all reach-me-down to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the assemblage went public (with a stock exchange capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the announcement, Bosack resigned to show his shore up in compensation her.
Bosack and his wife 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 bring out in products and talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the assemblage completed 11 acquisitions. Divers acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the work when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up society located in Petaluma, California, for fro US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive possessions made nearby Cisco to latest, and single the
acquisition of Precise Atlanta has been larger. A few acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ province units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Bring up in excess of Internet Usage (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In late Cortege 2000, at the crest of the dot-com boom, Cisco router was the most
valuable friends in the crowd, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend lid of on touching US$108.03 billion,
it is still united of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 heiress of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "in search the exemplary property
of their relationships with employees and communities".