CISCO

Corporate history

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple that worked in computer operations staff at Stanford University, later joined by Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. The name "Cisco" was derived from the city name, San Francisco. Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally written by William Yeager, another staff employee who had begun the work years before Bosack arrived from the University of Pennsylvania, where Bosack had received his bachelor's degree.

While Cisco was not the first company to develop and sell a router (a device that forwards computer traffic between two or more networks), it was one of the first to sell commercially successful routers supporting multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol (IP) has become a standard, the importance of multi-protocol routing as a function has declined. Today, Cisco's largest routers are marketed to route primarily IP packets and MPLS frames.

In 1990, the company went public and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Lerner was fired and because of that, Bosack quit but not before receiving $200 million. Most of those profits were given to charities and the two later divorced.

During the Internet boom in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corp., a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, for about US$7 billion. It was the most expensive acquisition made by Cisco at that time. Since then, only Cisco's acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta has been bigger.

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. In 2007, with a market cap of about US$180 billion, it is still one of the most valuable companies.

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). More recently, on July 23, 2008 Cisco acquired leading home network management software company Pure Networks, creator of Network Magic; thus, opening new doors as the leader in a growing software and hardware networking industry -- Cisco leading the way.

The company was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Award.

Cisco has put a major effort into its foray into virtualization technologies. Announced in early 2008, with broad facing concept to a self healing system capable of 15 terabits per second transfer rates. The new type of NX-OS based operating system fully virtualized with tool sets to apply programmable APIs with web services oriented tool sets to control the switch with XML applying them across contexts automatically. Security with link layer based encryption embedded into the switching the fabric itself with tags applied independent to IP addresses creating a fully abstracted set of ACLs to control while staying separate from machine addresses in a typical network installation.