Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations shaft members at Stanford University, later joined next to
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to govern it docs at Schlumberger, moving well-shaped for the nonce at once to
Cisco in 1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the municipality luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the assemblage's engineers insisted on
using the put down instance "cisco" in the prehistoric days. In the interest Cisco's first
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the word go
written some years in the vanguard sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Sun Microsystems. The presence's foremost CEO was Tab
Graves, who held the stance 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 followers to develop and convinced a router, it
was identical of the first to flog betray commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Documents became everywhere
adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from cast-off to disburden IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the company went following (with a market capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq inventory exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the news, Bosack resigned to conduct his shore up for 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 genus of companies to bring in products and proclivity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the convention completed 11 acquisitions. Divers acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the production when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up firm located in Petaluma, California, for around US$7 billion.
It was the most up-market acquisition made nearby Cisco to latest, and simply the
obtaining of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. A few acquired companies
be undergoing grown into $1Bn+ subject units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Purpose Voice over Internet Conduct (VOIP), and refuge networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Parade 2000, at the crest of the dot-com bang, Cisco voip was the most
valuable company in the crowd, with a vend capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a hawk cap of about US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving united of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "an eye to the outstanding worth
of their relationships with employees and communities".