Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations stave members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to tell linux soft at Schlumberger, compelling entire for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The pre-eminence "Cisco" was derived from the burg luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the discredit case "cisco" in the early days. As a service to Cisco's pre-eminent
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years in front by William Yeager, another Stanford wage-earner
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The company's earliest CEO was Banknote
Graves, who held the placement from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the original company to develop and convinced a router, it
was identical of the oldest to peddle commercially famous routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Documents became thoroughly
adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are first of all cast-off to disburden IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went societal (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the newscast, Bosack resigned to conduct his reinforce in search 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 variety of companies to bring in products and talent into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. A number of acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the work when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, representing fro US$7 billion.
It was the most up-market possessions made at hand Cisco to antiquated, and at best the
obtaining of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Several acquired companies
get grown into $1Bn+ province units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Purpose Bring up in excess of Internet Conduct (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Cortege 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com bang, Cisco manual was the most
valuable friends in the existence, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange cap of about US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving whole of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "for the superior quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".