Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple 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 comp documents at Schlumberger, compelling full time to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the municipality luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the put down lawsuit "cisco" in the antiquated days. As a service to Cisco's first
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years earlier nearby William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The presence's foremost CEO was Banknote
Graves, who held the placement from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 via John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the first convention to evolve and convinced a router, it
was a given of the pre-eminent to flog betray commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Documents became thoroughly
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from cast-off to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went public (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 newscast, Bosack resigned to express his reinforce in search 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 variety of companies to attract in products and ingenuity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Several acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the industry when they occurred.
During the Internet blast in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, in the course of around US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced possessions made by means of Cisco to antiquated, and at best the
purchase of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Voice to the ground Internet Etiquette (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Parade 2000, at the apex of the dot-com prosper, Cisco doc was the most
valuable friends in the world, with a vend capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend exceed of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving one of the most valuable companies.

The circle was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "for the superior worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".