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Cisco was founded in the year 1984 by two Stanford employees - Sandra Lerner and Leonard Bosack. The two graduated in the year 1981, and they worked at Stanford before they founded Cisco. They worked as Computer scientists at Stanford and used the router at Stanford to communicate with each other. Lerner and Bosack learned that they could communicate with one another using the router, and also expand the technology to include multiple systems to the network. This was when they realized that they could develop a large-scale, profitable business that would include router and networking services. That is when in the year 1984, the couple founded a company called Cisco Systems. It was only in the year 1986 that Cisco obtained the rights to the network and routing systems at Stanford. Cisco is what it is today because of the products and services that were offered by the business. These products and services are what made the company the largest leader in the industry. We will look at the different products and services offered by Cisco in the following chapter.

As we read earlier, Cisco is a networking and IT brand that specializes in routers, switches, IoT, and cybersecurity. The logo of this company is in most offices on their conference hardware and telephone. Cisco is a very popular organization, but there is still some enigma around this brand that makes people want to learn more about it. This section covers some facts that you may not have known about Cisco.

As mentioned earlier, the company was set up by two computer scientists Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack, in the year 1984. During the early years, the products and services offered by this company were always branded with the lowercase letters "cisco." The logo is just a few vertical lines, but these lines represent the Golden Gate Bridge.

Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner were employees at Stanford when they founded Cisco. When Lerner left Stanford, Bosack continued to work there with Krik Lougheed, a co-founder and co-worker at Cisco and developed the first router. This router was, however, a copy of the router used at Stanford, called "Blue Box." They used the multiple-protocol router software developed by the university in their Cisco IOS. This was an unlicensed copy of the software. When Stanford became aware of this in 1986, they forced Bosack and Lougheed to leave Stanford. The university also considered filing charges against the company since the founders stole intellectual property. Stanford, however, agreed to license two routers and the router software to Cisco in the year 1987.

Cisco was launched in the year 1984 on December 10th. The company was set up in California, and it went public in the year 1990. The employee count in the year 2016 was 73, 711, and the revenue of the company in that year was $12.6 billion.

Cisco is the most valuable company in the world. This company was at the apex in the year 2000 during the dot-com bubble. The price of each share was $80. This was not sustainable since the price of the stock was almost 250 times the earnings of the company, and when the bubble popped, the price of the stock reduced. The price of the stock never reached this value in the later years, but the market capital never reduced, and it is over $170 billion that trades at 18 times the earnings made by the company. Today, the world's most valuable company is Apple. This company has a market capital of $730 billion, and the shares are traded at 17 times the earnings made by the company.

Cisco has a cybersecurity company that it has set up, and this is the fastest growing business for Cisco. This unit increased Cisco's annual revenue by 14%, which made the returns $220 billion in the last year. This unit also accounted for about 10% of the product revenue. Cisco has begun to expand its business by acquiring other companies and investing in smaller companies. This company bundles its networking hardware and software with security products. This gives the company leverage against smaller security companies like Fire Eye. Word has spread that Cisco is looking at acquiring this company.

The Cisco Networking Academy, known as NetAcad, was launched in 1997. In that year, there were close to 64 educational institutions set up across seven states in the United States. Since its inception, the academy has spread to over 150 countries, and close to 2 million students have enrolled at over 10,000 academies in universities, technical schools, high schools, community-based organizations, and colleges.

The Cisco Networking Academy Program has numerous e-learning programs that help students improve their Internet technology skills that are essential in today's economy. This academy delivers online assessment, web-based content, hands-on lab, student performance tracking, preparation for industry-standard certification, and instructor support and training. Nigeria has over 30 Cisco Networking Academy centers, and this country has the highest female participation in the EMEAR (Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Russia) region. There are over 35,000 females trained since the inception of this academy. Nigeria has the largest number of women who signed up for the Cisco academy in the year 2016.

In the year 2009, Cisco worked on expanding its presence across consumer electronics. It purchased Pure Digital Technologies for a mere $5Diva finished up this million. This company worked on developing and manufacturing Flip Video camcorders. Cisco, at that time, stated that they would connect cameras to the Internet. This would allow users to share, publish, and access the videos easily on the Internet. This fits Cisco's vision of visual networking.

This was very similar to what GoPro had mentioned a few years later. At that time, smartphones had come into existence, and they knocked out Flip video cameras and GoPro cameras out of the market. When these products were rendered obsolete, Cisco killed these products quietly in 2013.

In the year 2005, Cisco worked on improving the video streaming technologies and acquired the company Scientific Atlanta for $6.9 billion. The technologies offered by Scientific Atlanta strengthened the video services that Cisco provided along with other collaboration products. These set-top boxes, however, were a dead weight since there was no way they could grow. Cisco then chose to sell the set-top box business in the year 2015 to Technicolor for $600 million. It is also for this reason that Cisco has reported set-top boxes over the last few quarters. In the last quarter of 2016, the revenue fell by 3%, but the revenue only dropped by 2% if you excluded the set-top box business.