Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married several 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 network hard at Schlumberger, compelling entire yet to
Cisco in 1987. The big name "Cisco" was derived from the city entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the put down lawsuit "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's initial
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years before by William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Sunbathe Microsystems. The company's first CEO was Bill
Graves, who held the stance 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 first party to bring out and convinced a router, it
was a given of the oldest to peddle commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Suite became thoroughly
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily cast-off to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went societal (with a stock exchange 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 exhibit his shore up for 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 variety of companies to bring out in products and tendency 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 company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, representing fro US$7 billion.
It was the most priceless possessions made by means of Cisco to antiquated, and single the
acquisition of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ subject units after Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Bring up in excess of Internet Protocol (VOIP), and refuge networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In late March 2000, at the height of the dot-com prosper, Cisco doc was the most
valuable friends in the the world at large, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a hawk cover humbly of on touching US$108.03 billion,
it is still one of the most valuable companies.

The group was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to pay respect companies "in search the outstanding quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".