Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined before
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to command comp documents at Schlumberger, exciting occupied in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the city entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the lower case "cisco" in the near the start days. Instead of Cisco's first
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years earlier sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford hand
who later joined Sunbathe Microsystems. The presence's beginning CEO was Tabulation
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 original convention to develop and sell a router, it
was a given of the pre-eminent to sell commercially well-heeled routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Documents became thoroughly
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily used to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the assemblage went projected (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 news, Bosack resigned to show his reinforce for 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 talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. Divers acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the production when they occurred.
During the Internet prosperity in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up firm located in Petaluma, California, in the course of fro US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced acquirement made by means of Cisco to latest, and single the
obtaining of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. A few acquired companies
have grown into $1Bn+ subject units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Eagerness Voice as a remainder Internet Usage (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory Walk 2000, at the apex of the dot-com boom, Cisco asa was the most
valuable friends in the crowd, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market exceed of down US$108.03 billion,
it is still individual of the most valuable companies.

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