Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations shaft members at Stanford University, later joined next to
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to command it documents at Schlumberger, moving well-shaped time to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the municipality entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the put down instance "cisco" in the near the start days. In the interest Cisco's first
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years in front sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The retinue's foremost CEO was Tab
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 original followers to evolve and push a router, it
was identical of the pre-eminent to retail commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Accountable became everywhere
adopted, the note of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially cast-off to disburden IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went societal (with a stock exchange 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 show his shore up 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 bring in products and talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the work when they occurred.
During the Internet blast in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, throughout on every side US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced procurement made at hand Cisco to boy, and single the
acquisition of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ business units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Eagerness Utter over Internet Protocol (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In late March 2000, at the crest of the dot-com boom, Cisco pdf was the most
valuable friends in the the world at large, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market exceed of about US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify individual of the most valuable companies.

The group was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Prize, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "an eye to the meritorious quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".