Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple 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 command linux software at Schlumberger, moving full in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the burg entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the lower if it happens "cisco" in the prehistoric days. As a service to Cisco's initial
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years in front on William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The presence's beginning CEO was Tab
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 bring out and convinced a router, it
was identical of the first to sell commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Accountable became greatly
adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all used to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the assemblage went societal (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 expos‚, Bosack resigned to show his shore up suitable 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 medley of companies to attract in products and talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the attendance completed 11 acquisitions. Several acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet blast in 1999, the performers acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, representing around US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive possessions made by means of Cisco to boy, and only the
obtaining of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. A few acquired companies
get grown into $1Bn+ business units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Eagerness Utter as a remainder Internet Protocol (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In late Parade 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, Cisco system was the most
valuable friends in the the world at large, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend cap of about US$108.03 billion,
it is still individual of the most valuable companies.

The circle was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Trophy, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "an eye to the meritorious worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".