Cisco System

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorUniversity, Master's February 2008

download word file, 25 pages 5.0

Company History Cisco was founded not in a garage but in a living room. Wife-and-husband team Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack worked in two different departments at Stanford University. They wanted to send e-mail to each other; however, the departments were on two different operating systems which did not "talk" to each other. To remedy the situation, they built a router, a "translator" that acted like a mailroom, opening packets and distributing the data. The software allowed the data to be read by any kind of computer on the network, even across different operating systems.

The year was 1984 and the Internet had 1,000 computers connected to it. In 1986 the company attended its first trade show and shipped its first product ? the AGS Router. In 1987 the company received its first, and only, venture capital funding from Sequoia and issued its first coffee mug. John Morgridge was named as the company?s CEO in 1988 marking Cisco?s first move to professional management.

On February 20, 1990 Cisco makes its first IPO. The World Wide Web is launched and Cisco, with over 200 employees, finishes the year with over a million dollars in profits. Nihon Cisco, the company?s first subsidiary, was opened in 1992. The company hires Pete Solvik, an Apple Computers veteran to be its Chief Information Officer. In his Live Keynote Address at Comdex/Fall '97 CEO John Chambers noted: " If you take a look at the point in which Cisco broke away from its competitors in the networking market, you can see that it was in 1992. In that year Cisco stopped treating its IS department as an expense center and started treating it as a strategic advantage." In 1993, along with Edward Kozel, Cisco's Chief Technical Officer, Morgridge and Chambers launched Cisco on its present strategic...