Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married several who worked as computer
operations shaft members at Stanford University, later joined before
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to command java hard at Schlumberger, compelling entire time to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the see high regard,
San Francisco, which is why the presence's engineers insisted on
using the lower case "cisco" in the prehistoric days. For Cisco's pre-eminent
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years in the vanguard by William Yeager, another Stanford hand
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The presence's earliest CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the placement 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 basic party to develop and sell a router, it
was a given of the sooner to peddle commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Docs became widely
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily cast-off to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went following (with a merchandise capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the announcement, Bosack resigned to conduct his support in search 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 genus of companies to attract in products and ingenuity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the work when they occurred.
During the Internet blast in 1999, the performers acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, throughout around US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive acquisition made by means of Cisco to boy, and simply the
obtaining of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ business units for the purpose Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Voice to the ground Internet Usage (VOIP), and refuge networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory Walk 2000, at the apex of the dot-com boom, Cisco system was the most
valuable attendance in the the world at large, with a vend capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a hawk cover humbly of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is restful whole of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "for the outstanding worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".