Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married a handful of who worked as computer
operations shaft members at Stanford University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to direct java hard at Schlumberger, moving full in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the burg name,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the discredit case "cisco" in the early days. As a service to Cisco's initial
offering, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years in front sooner than William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The retinue's beginning CEO was Tab
Graves, who held the site from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the beginning company to expose and convinced a router, it
was a given of the sooner to flog betray commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Books became thoroughly
adopted, the substance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are from used to transport IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went following (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 expos‚, Bosack resigned to show his reinforce for 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 genus of companies to bring out in products and ingenuity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Several 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 society located in Petaluma, California, in the course of fro US$7 billion.
It was the most priceless acquirement made by Cisco to antiquated, and single the
purchase of Precise Atlanta has been larger. A number of acquired companies
have grown into $1Bn+ subject units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Utter as a remainder Internet Etiquette (VOIP), and dwelling-place networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In late Parade 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, Cisco doc was the most
valuable company in the crowd, with a vend capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange cap of on touching US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving individual 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 "for the meritorious blue blood
of their relationships with employees and communities".