Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married several who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to direct java doc at Schlumberger, stirring well-shaped yet to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the city luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the discredit lawsuit "cisco" in the antiquated days. In the interest Cisco's earliest
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years before sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Sunbathe Microsystems. The retinue's earliest 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 original convention to develop and convinced a router, it
was one of the oldest to peddle commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Books became widely
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially cast-off to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went projected (with a stock exchange 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 conduct his funding for her.
Bosack and his the missis walked away from Cisco with $170 million, 70% of which was
committed to charities. The two later divorced.

Cisco acquired a variety of companies to attract in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the work when they occurred.
During the Internet explosion in 1999, the friends acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, for on every side US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive acquisition made at hand Cisco to antiquated, and single the
acquisition of Precise Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ province units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Turn in excess of Internet Etiquette (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory March 2000, at the crest of the dot-com prosper, Cisco system was the most
valuable attendance in the world, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend exceed of about US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify whole of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "in behalf of the exemplary property
of their relationships with employees and communities".