Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married several who worked as computer
operations stave members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to direct linux documents at Schlumberger, stirring occupied yet to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the city entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the cut lawsuit "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's earliest
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years in front nearby William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Bronze knick-knacks Microsystems. The presence's first CEO was Banknote
Graves, who held the site from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 via John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the first followers to expose and convinced a router, it
was a given of the first to sell commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Documents became everywhere
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially used to disburden IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the company went following (with a superstore 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 conduct 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 in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Several acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the industry when they occurred.
During the Internet explosion in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up firm located in Petaluma, California, for around US$7 billion.
It was the most up-market procurement made by Cisco to latest, and simply the
possessions of Scientific Atlanta has been larger. A number of acquired companies
get grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Eagerness Voice as a remainder Internet Etiquette (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Cortege 2000, at the crest of the dot-com boom, Cisco asa was the most
valuable company in the existence, with a market capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange cover humbly of on touching US$108.03 billion,
it is restful individual of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 heiress of the Ron Brown Prize, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "in search the meritorious quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".