... University, later joined by
Richard Troiano, founded
Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on to direct computer services at
Schlumberger, moving full time to Cisco in 1987.<hr> The name "Cisco" was derived from the city name, San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on using the lower case 'cisco' in the early days. For Cisco's first product, Bosack adapted multiple-
protocol router software originally written some years before by
William Yeager, another Stanford employee who later joined
Sun Microsystems.
While Cisco was not the first company to develop and sell a router,[4] it was one of the first to sell commercially successful routers supporting multiple network protocols.[5] As the Internet Protocol (IP) became widely adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's largest routers are primarily used to deliver IP packets and MPLS frames.
In 1990, the company was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Lerner was fired; as a result Bosack quit after receiving $200 million. Most of those profits were given to charities and the two later divorced.
Cisco acquired a variety of companies to bring in products and talent into the company. Several acquisitions, such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the industry when they occurred. During the Internet boom in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation, a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, for about US$7 billion. It was the most expensive acquisition made by Cisco to date, and only the acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta has been larger. Although not every acquisition is successful, Cisco has succeeded more frequently than its competitors in integrating and growing the revenue of its acquisitions. Several acquired companies have grown into $1Bn+ business units for Cisco, including LAN switching, Enterprise Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP), and home networking.
In late March 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalization of more than US$500 billion.[6][7] In July 2009, with a market cap of about US$108.03 billion[8], it is still one of the most valuable companies.[9] CSCO was voted stock of the decade on NASDAQ. The company's 7500 Series router was voted 3rd in the product of the decade 1990-2000 behind the Mosaic web browser and the Novell LAN manager.
Cisco has made inroads into many network equipment markets outside routing, including Ethernet switching, remote access, branch office routers, ATM networking, security, IP telephony, and others. In 2003, Cisco acquired Linksys, a popular manufacturer of computer networking hardware and positioned it as a leading brand for the home and end user networking market (SOHO).
The company's first two CEOs are John Morgridge and John Chambers[10] (active). The Corporate Headquarters is on East Tasman Drive in San Jose, California, between Zanker Road and Cisco Way.
The company was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Award.
Cisco's vision is "Changing the Way We Work, Live, Play and Learn." Cisco's current tagline is "Welcome to the human network."[11]
