Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married yoke who worked as computer
operations staff members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to govern it docs at Schlumberger, stirring entire for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the see name,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the discredit lawsuit "cisco" in the prehistoric days. In the interest Cisco's initial
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the start
written some years in the vanguard by William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The retinue's first CEO was Bill
Graves, who held the site 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 first party to develop and give away a router, it
was a given of the first to retail commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Security became widely
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily cast-off to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the assemblage went projected (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock 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 selection of companies to bring in products and talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet explosion in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up firm located in Petaluma, California, for fro US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive acquisition made nearby Cisco to antiquated, and single the
acquisition of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. A few acquired companies
get grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units for the purpose Cisco, including LAN switching,
Eagerness Utter as a remainder Internet Etiquette (VOIP), and refuge networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In fashionable Cortege 2000, at the crest of the dot-com boom, Cisco firewall was the most
valuable company in the crowd, with a market capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange lid of about US$108.03 billion,
it is restful whole of the most valuable companies.

The circle was a 2002-03 heiress of the Ron Brown Prize, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "in behalf of the exemplary worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".