Cisco Systems
 | |
| Type: | Publicly held |
| Industry: | Internet |
| Founded: | 1984 |
| Founder(s): | Len Bosack Sandy Lerner Richard Troiano |
| Headquarters: | 170 West Tasman Dr. San Jose CA 95134 |
| Country: | USA |
| Employees: | 73,408 as of 2011 [1] |
| Revenue: | $ 40.040 billion (FY 2010) [2] |
| Website: | www.cisco.com |
| Facebook: | Cisco |
| Twitter: |  Systems @Cisco Systems
|
| Key People | |
| John T. Chambers, Chairman & CEO Frank Calderoni, EVP and CFO Gary Moore, EVP & COO Robert Lloyd, EVP World Opertions Wim Elfrink, EVP & Chief Globalization Officer | |
Cisco Systems (NADAQ: CSCO) is an American multinational company involved in designing, manufacturing and selling Internet Protocol (IP) based networking such as routers used to interconnect public and IP networks for mobile, data, voice, and video applications; switching products, security products, servers, modems and many other products and services used by the Information and Communications Technology industry. The company has more than 73 thousand employees with 460 offices within 160 countries worldwide.[3] Cisco is based in San Jose, California.
=Background
Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a couple working at the Stanford University built the Advanced Gateway Server, a multi-protocol router which is an improvement of the routing program built by William Yeager and Andy Bechtolshein. Bosack and Lerner experimented designed the router from their living room.[4] They experimented the capability of their newly designed router using the two detached networks at Stanford. After probing that their design is effective and marketable they made a proposal to Stanford to build and sell the routers however, the University rejected the idea. In 1984, the couple co-founded "Cisco" which means city to the north.[5]
Lerner and Bosack borrowed money from their credit cards to start up the business and they used their house as their business headquarter to build, test and sell their routers. When the business started to grow, they decided to incorporate the company with the help of venture capitalists.During that time, Cisco as already making around quarter a million without a professional sales and marketing staff. Don Valentin, a venture capitalist agreed that his company will invest on Cisco with certain conditions which include, Sequioa will provide the management team and strategy on how to run the business. John Morgridge was the first President and CEO of Cisco. Bosack and Lerner never get along with Morgridge and in 1990 when the company was already worth a billion dollars, the upper management of the company approached Valentin to removed Lerner from the company if not they will resign.Lerner and Bosack left Cisco and they received $170 million dollars settlement.[6]
Since its establishment Cisco continued to grow and its net profit for the fiscal year 2010 already reached more than 40 billion dollars.John T. Chambers is the current Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the company.