Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations staff members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to command linux hard at Schlumberger, moving entire for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the burg entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the lower case "cisco" in the antiquated days. In the interest Cisco's initial
product, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years earlier sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford hand
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The assemblage's earliest CEO was Bill
Graves, who held the stance from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 via John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the beginning company to evolve and convinced a router, it
was bromide of the sooner to retail commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Guide became everywhere
adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all used to deliver IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group 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 show his support for 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 medley of companies to attract in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the attendance completed 11 acquisitions. A number of acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, in the course of about US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive procurement made nearby Cisco to date, and only the
obtaining of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Purpose Bring up over Internet Usage (VOIP), and refuge networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Walk 2000, at the apex of the dot-com bang, Cisco doc was the most
valuable company in the crowd, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend cap of down US$108.03 billion,
it is still individual of the most valuable companies.

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