Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married several who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to govern network hard at Schlumberger, stirring entire for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the city name,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the discredit if it happens "cisco" in the early days. In the interest Cisco's first
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years earlier by William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The assemblage's foremost CEO was Banknote
Graves, who held the stance 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 expose and sell a router, it
was one of the oldest to retail commercially well-heeled routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Documents became thoroughly
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily used to deliver IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went public (with a market capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to exhibit his funding suitable 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 in products and proclivity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the assemblage completed 11 acquisitions. Divers acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the production when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up society located in Petaluma, California, in the course of around US$7 billion.
It was the most up-market acquisition made at hand Cisco to date, and only the
acquisition of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. A few acquired companies
get grown into $1Bn+ province units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Utter in excess of Internet Conduct (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent March 2000, at the crest of the dot-com boom, Cisco router was the most
valuable gathering in the crowd, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market exceed of about US$108.03 billion,
it is restful whole of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Trophy, a U.S.
presidential honor to pay respect companies "an eye to the meritorious property
of their relationships with employees and communities".