Cisco Systems

Type: Public
Founded: 1984
Headquarters: San Jose, California, USA
Key people: CEO and President: John Chambers, Chairman: John Chambers
Industry: Networking hardware
Products: Switches, Routers, Firewalls
Website: www.cisco.com

General Information

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO, SEHK: 4333) is an American multinational corporation with 54,000 employees and annual revenue of US $28.48 billion as of 2006. Headquartered in San Jose, California, it designs and sells networking and communications technology and services under four brands, namely Cisco, Linksys, WebEx and Scientific Atlanta. Initially, Cisco manufactured only enterprise multi-protocol routers but gradually diversified its product offering to move into the home user market with technologies such as VoIP while also expanding its offering for corporate customers.

History

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple that worked in computer operations staff at Stanford University, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. 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 multi-protocol routers, to allow previously incompatible computers to communicate using different 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. Bosack and Lerner walked away from the company with $170 million and later divorced.

During the Internet boom in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corp., a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, for about $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 $500 billion. In 2007, with a market cap of about $180 billion, it is still one of the most valuable companies.

Using acquisitions, internal development, and partnering with other 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).

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