The History of Cisco

Cisco is a multinational corporation with a staggering 66,000 plus employees with an annual revenue of around $39billion as of 2008. The headquarters are in San Jose, CA and the company designs and sells communication and networking technology as well as services. The name Cisco is derived from the city San Francisco.

Cisco was not the first company to sell commercial routers and other networking products but their products are used by many large enterprise, corporate and service provider networks that make use of a number of complex technologies. The company was made public on the Nasdaq exchange in 1990 with one of the founders, Lerner, being fired. The other owner Bosack quit shortly after this but received $200m with the majority of the profits going to charities.

Cisco has always strived for innovation and enlists talent but purchasing up and coming companies. Some of the acquisitions that Cisco made were the largest ever M&A deals at the time. While the internet boom was starting in 1999 the company bought Cerent Corp. for approximately $7 billion dollars, the highest valued acquisition that Cisco made up to date.

When the dot.com boom was at its highest in March 2000, Cisco was the most valued company in the world by some length. The market capitalisation that Cisco reached was $500 billion with Cisco being voted as stock of the decade on the Nasdaq exchange. Cisco evolved as a company and began to expand into software technology that was required by telephone companies and thanks to the deregulation of the US telecoms industry they were able to provide software and products required by increasingly complex data communication.

Cisco then began contraction with European telecommunications companies, British Telecom became and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) client for all of Cisco’s products. Other EU telecommunications companies entered into OEM relationships with Cisco, these include Alcatel of France and Siemans of Germany. Cisco carried on to align itself in the growing internet working market.

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