Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to direct network doc at Schlumberger, moving occupied time to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the burg high regard,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the put down instance "cisco" in the early days. Instead of Cisco's initial
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years before sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The assemblage's foremost CEO was Banknote
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 basic party to bring out and sell a router, it
was identical of the sooner to peddle commercially well-heeled routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Manual became greatly
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily used to deliver IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the company went public (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the announcement, Bosack resigned to show his shore up in search 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 bring out in products and ingenuity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the attendance completed 11 acquisitions. A number of acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet explosion in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up society located in Petaluma, California, in the course of around US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive acquirement made nearby Cisco to antiquated, and single the
acquisition of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
have grown into $1Bn+ province units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Eagerness Turn in excess of Internet Protocol (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In late Walk 2000, at the crest of the dot-com prosper, Cisco manual was the most
valuable friends in the world, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market lid of down US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving whole of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Trophy, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "an eye to the exemplary worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".