Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married several who worked as computer
operations shaft members at Stanford University, later joined before
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell it pdf at Schlumberger, exciting well-shaped in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the see name,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the discredit case "cisco" in the prehistoric days. Instead of Cisco's pre-eminent
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years earlier on William Yeager, another Stanford hand
who later joined Bronze knick-knacks Microsystems. The retinue's first CEO was Tabulation
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 beginning convention to evolve and convinced a router, it
was one of the pre-eminent to retail commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Suite became greatly
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially cast-off to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went societal (with a merchandise capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the newscast, Bosack resigned to show his support suitable 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 genus of companies to attract in products and ingenuity 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 explosion in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, throughout about US$7 billion.
It was the most up-market procurement made at hand Cisco to date, and single the
possessions of Precise Atlanta has been larger. A few acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ business units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Utter to the ground Internet Protocol (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In fashionable Parade 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com prosper, Cisco firewall was the most
valuable attendance in the the world at large, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market exceed of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is still united of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 receiver of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to pay respect companies "in search the exemplary worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".