Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations stave members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell java hard at Schlumberger, compelling well-shaped in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the see name,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the lower if it happens "cisco" in the near the start days. As a service to Cisco's pre-eminent
product, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years before by William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Bronze knick-knacks Microsystems. The company's foremost CEO was Bill
Graves, who held the position 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 followers to evolve and sell a router, it
was one of the pre-eminent to peddle commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Documents became thoroughly
adopted, the note of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all reach-me-down to deliver IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went societal (with a market capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to express his shore up 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 variety of companies to bring in products and ingenuity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. A number of acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the industry when they occurred.
During the Internet prosperity in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, representing about US$7 billion.
It was the most priceless acquirement made by Cisco to date, and single the
purchase of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ province units for the purpose Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Utter in excess of Internet Conduct (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory March 2000, at the height of the dot-com increase, Cisco manual was the most
valuable company in the the world at large, with a vend capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange exceed of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving united of the most valuable companies.

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