Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations staff members at Stanford University, later joined next to
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to direct it ppt at Schlumberger, exciting well-shaped in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the city entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the put down instance "cisco" in the near the start days. As a service to Cisco's first
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years earlier nearby William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The company's first CEO was Banknote
Graves, who held the placement from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the original party to evolve and sell a router, it
was a given of the oldest to sell commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Documents became greatly
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily reach-me-down to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the company went following (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq house exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the newscast, Bosack resigned to express his reinforce for 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 medley of companies to bring out in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the attendance completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet prosperity in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, in the course of about US$7 billion.
It was the most priceless acquirement made nearby Cisco to boy, and at best the
acquisition of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units after Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Voice over Internet Conduct (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory Cortege 2000, at the apex of the dot-com bang, Cisco asa was the most
valuable gathering in the existence, with a superstore capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market exceed of about US$108.03 billion,
it is restful whole of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Trophy, a U.S.
presidential honor to pay respect companies "in search the superior quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".