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 java documents at Schlumberger, stirring entire in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The big name "Cisco" was derived from the municipality luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the lower lawsuit "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's initial
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years earlier by William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The company's beginning CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the placement from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 past John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the beginning convention to evolve and sell a router, it
was bromide of the oldest to sell commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Safe became greatly
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from used to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went projected (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq house exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to exhibit his support 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 bring out in products and talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Several acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet blast in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, representing around US$7 billion.
It was the most priceless acquisition made by means of Cisco to date, and at best the
possessions of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units for the purpose Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Bring up to the ground Internet Usage (VOIP), and refuge networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory Cortege 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com boom, Cisco guide was the most
valuable friends in the world, with a vend capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange cap of on touching US$108.03 billion,
it is still one of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "for the superior blue blood
of their relationships with employees and communities".