Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations shaft members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell network doc at Schlumberger, exciting well-shaped time to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the see high regard,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the put down instance "cisco" in the near the start days. In the interest Cisco's first
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years in front nearby William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The presence's foremost CEO was Bill
Graves, who held the site 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 beginning convention to evolve and sell a router, it
was identical of the pre-eminent to peddle commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Security became widely
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all cast-off to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went societal (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 news, Bosack resigned to show his funding in compensation her.
Bosack and his the missis 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 talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet blast in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, for fro US$7 billion.
It was the most up-market acquisition made nearby Cisco to date, and single the
acquisition of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. A number of acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ business units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Purpose Turn to the ground Internet Usage (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent March 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, Cisco voip was the most
valuable friends in the the world at large, with a market capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a hawk cap of about US$108.03 billion,
it is still whole of the most valuable companies.

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