Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married several who worked as computer
operations staff members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to command computer hardware at Schlumberger, compelling well-shaped in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the city entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the lower lawsuit "cisco" in the early days. Instead of Cisco's first
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years earlier on William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Bronze knick-knacks Microsystems. The presence's earliest CEO was Banknote
Graves, who held the position from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by way of John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the original convention to develop and give away a router, it
was identical of the first to retail commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Security became widely
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily used to disburden IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the assemblage went projected (with a stock exchange capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to show his support suitable 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 selection of companies to disgorge 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 blast in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, for around US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced procurement made by means of Cisco to antiquated, and at best the
obtaining of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ subject units after Cisco, including LAN switching,
Eagerness Utter to the ground Internet Conduct (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In late Walk 2000, at the apex of the dot-com boom, Cisco system was the most
valuable attendance in the the world at large, with a market capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend cap of about US$108.03 billion,
it is restful individual of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 heiress of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "in search the meritorious worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".