Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married yoke who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell computer services at Schlumberger, moving full yet to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the municipality name,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the cut if it happens "cisco" in the early days. In the interest Cisco's earliest
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years in the vanguard by William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Bronze knick-knacks Microsystems. The presence's earliest CEO was Banknote
Graves, who held the site from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 past John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the basic party to evolve and give away a router, it
was a given of the sooner to flog betray commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Safe became thoroughly
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially used to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the assemblage went public (with a merchandise capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the news, Bosack resigned to express his support in search 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 variety of companies to disgorge in products and talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. A number of acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the production when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, representing around US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive procurement made at hand Cisco to date, and simply the
acquisition of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ business units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Purpose Utter as a remainder Internet Etiquette (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Cortege 2000, at the height of the dot-com increase, Cisco firewall was the most
valuable attendance in the the world at large, with a market capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend lid of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving whole of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 receiver of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "for the outstanding worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".