Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married yoke who worked as computer
operations shaft members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to direct linux pdf at Schlumberger, moving entire time to
Cisco in 1987. The big name "Cisco" was derived from the city entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the cut instance "cisco" in the early days. As a service to Cisco's earliest
product, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years in the vanguard by William Yeager, another Stanford hand
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The assemblage's earliest CEO was Bill
Graves, who held the placement 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 expose and give away a router, it
was bromide of the sooner to sell commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Documents became everywhere
adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from cast-off to disburden IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went following (with a merchandise capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the news, Bosack resigned to exhibit his reinforce 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 bring out in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet explosion in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up society located in Petaluma, California, throughout fro US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive procurement made by means of Cisco to latest, and only the
purchase of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. A number of acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ province units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Voice to the ground Internet Protocol (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Walk 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com increase, Cisco vendor was the most
valuable gathering in the world, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market exceed of on touching US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving one of the most valuable companies.

The group was a 2002-03 heiress of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "in behalf of the exemplary blue blood
of their relationships with employees and communities".