Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined before
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to govern network doc at Schlumberger, moving entire in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the municipality luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the cut instance "cisco" in the prehistoric days. For Cisco's earliest
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years earlier sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Bronze knick-knacks Microsystems. The assemblage's earliest CEO was Tab
Graves, who held the position from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 via John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the original company to evolve and convinced a router, it
was one of the oldest to sell commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Accountable became widely
adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all cast-off to deliver IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went societal (with a merchandise capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq house exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the news, Bosack resigned to show his funding suitable her.
Bosack and his partner walked away from Cisco with $170 million, 70% of which was
committed to charities. The two later divorced.

Cisco acquired a selection of companies to disgorge in products and proclivity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the attendance completed 11 acquisitions. Several acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the industry when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the performers acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up firm located in Petaluma, California, in the course of on every side US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive acquirement made by means of Cisco to date, and at best the
obtaining of Precise Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ subject units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Purpose Voice over Internet Conduct (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent March 2000, at the apex of the dot-com increase, Cisco manual was the most
valuable friends in the the world at large, with a vend capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market exceed of down US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify individual of the most valuable companies.

The group was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "an eye to the outstanding property
of their relationships with employees and communities".