Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations stave members at Stanford University, later joined before
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to govern it hardware at Schlumberger, exciting occupied for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the municipality high regard,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the put down instance "cisco" in the near the start days. Instead of Cisco's initial
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years before nearby William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The retinue's first CEO was Tab
Graves, who held the position from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 past John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the first convention to bring out and give away a router, it
was bromide of the oldest to flog betray commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Accountable became everywhere
adopted, the note of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from used to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went public (with a market capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the announcement, Bosack resigned to exhibit his funding in compensation her.
Bosack and his old lady 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 bring in products and proclivity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the assemblage completed 11 acquisitions. Divers acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the work when they occurred.
During the Internet prosperity in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, in the course of about US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive possessions made by means of Cisco to date, and at best the
possessions of Precise Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ responsibility units for the purpose Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Voice over Internet Usage (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory Parade 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com boom, Cisco vendor was the most
valuable attendance in the crowd, with a vend capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a hawk cap of on touching US$108.03 billion,
it is still whole of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "for the superior blue blood
of their relationships with employees and communities".