Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married yoke who worked as computer
operations staff members at Stanford University, later joined before
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell computer hard at Schlumberger, compelling occupied 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 put down case "cisco" in the prehistoric days. For Cisco's earliest
offshoot, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years in the vanguard nearby William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The assemblage's foremost CEO was Tab
Graves, who held the position 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 give away a router, it
was one of the oldest to retail commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Documents became everywhere
adopted, the note of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily acclimatized 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 inventory exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the newscast, Bosack resigned to exhibit his funding 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 disgorge in products and talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. Several acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the work when they occurred.
During the Internet prosperity in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, in the course of around US$7 billion.
It was the most up-market acquirement made at hand Cisco to latest, and at best the
possessions of Precise Atlanta has been larger. A few acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units after Cisco, including LAN switching,
Eagerness Voice as a remainder Internet Usage (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent March 2000, at the apex of the dot-com bang, Cisco firewall was the most
valuable friends in the the world at large, with a market capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend cover humbly of hither US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify individual of the most valuable companies.

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