Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations shaft members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell linux doc at Schlumberger, exciting occupied for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the municipality luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the discredit instance "cisco" in the prehistoric days. In the interest Cisco's first
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years in front nearby William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The retinue's foremost CEO was Tab
Graves, who held the position 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 one of the pre-eminent to flog betray commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Security - Assyrian Cafe Voice Chat became greatly
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all acclimatized to disburden IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the assemblage went public (with a merchandise capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to express his funding in search 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 variety of companies to disgorge in products and proclivity 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 corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, representing about US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive procurement made by Cisco to antiquated, and only the
obtaining of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ province units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Turn over Internet Conduct (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Walk 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, Cisco asa was the most
valuable company in the crowd, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange exceed of about US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving united of the most valuable companies.

The group was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "an eye to the superior worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".