Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married several 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 comp hardware at Schlumberger, stirring full yet to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the city luminary,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the lower lawsuit "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's initial
product, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years earlier on William Yeager, another Stanford employee
who later joined Sunbathe Microsystems. The retinue's foremost CEO was Banknote
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 original party to evolve and sell a router, it
was a given of the pre-eminent to peddle commercially successful routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Books became thoroughly
adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially used to deliver IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went public (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to express his shore up 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 medley of companies to disgorge in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the attendance completed 11 acquisitions. Various acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the production when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the corporation acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up assemblage located in Petaluma, California, for around US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced acquirement made nearby Cisco to boy, and only the
acquisition of Orderly Atlanta has been larger. A number of acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ subject units for Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Turn to the ground Internet Protocol (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory March 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, Cisco asa was the most
valuable company in the world, with a vend capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market exceed of about US$108.03 billion,
it is restful whole of the most valuable companies.

The circle was a 2002-03 receiver of the Ron Brown Present, a U.S.
presidential honor to concede companies "an eye to the exemplary quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".