Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to command computer services at Schlumberger, exciting entire for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the municipality entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the lower case "cisco" in the prehistoric days. In the interest Cisco's pre-eminent
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years before by William Yeager, another Stanford hand
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The company's foremost CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the position from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 past John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the beginning followers to evolve and convinced a router, it
was one of the first to retail commercially well-heeled routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Security became widely
adopted, the note of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from reach-me-down to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the company went public (with a merchandise capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq inventory exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the announcement, Bosack resigned to show his support in search 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 disgorge 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 effort when they occurred.
During the Internet blast in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up firm located in Petaluma, California, for around US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced procurement made by Cisco to boy, and simply the
possessions of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
get grown into $1Bn+ subject units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In fashionable Walk 2000, at the height of the dot-com bang, Cisco firewall was the most
valuable company in the crowd, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange exceed of down US$108.03 billion,
it is still one of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 heiress of the Ron Brown Trophy, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "in search the outstanding worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".