Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married yoke who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined before
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell comp hard at Schlumberger, exciting well-shaped for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the municipality high regard,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the put down if it happens "cisco" in the prehistoric days. For Cisco's earliest
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years earlier on William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The presence's first CEO was Tab
Graves, who held the stance from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the beginning company to evolve and sell a router, it
was a given of the pre-eminent to sell commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Manual became everywhere
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially acclimatized to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the assemblage went projected (with a merchandise capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq inventory exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to express his support 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 genus of companies to bring in products and ingenuity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the assemblage completed 11 acquisitions. Various 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 priceless possessions made nearby Cisco to antiquated, and at best the
possessions of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. A number of acquired companies
have grown into $1Bn+ province units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Purpose Turn to the ground Internet Conduct (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In fashionable Walk 2000, at the height of the dot-com prosper, Cisco manual was the most
valuable friends in the existence, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market cap of on touching US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving whole of the most valuable companies.

The group was a 2002-03 receiver of the Ron Brown Trophy, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "an eye to the exemplary blue blood
of their relationships with employees and communities".