Cisco

Cisco is better positioned than ever before to lead the Internet economy and help change the way we work, live, play, and learn. Key Dates: Company ships its first product, a router for the TCP/IP protocol suite. Donald T. Valentine, a venture capitalist, gains control of the company; John Morgridge is named president and CEO. Cisco Systems, Inc. is the world's leading supplier of computer networking products, systems, and services. The company's product line includes routers, switches, remote access devices, protocol translators, Internet services devices, and networking and network management software, all of which link together geographically dispersed local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), and the Internet itself. Cisco serves three main market segments: large organizations--including corporations, government entities, utilities, and educational institutions--needing complex networking solutions that typically bridge multiple locations; service providers, including Internet access providers, telephone and cable companies, and providers of wireless communications; and small and medium-sized businesses whose needs include operating networks, connecting to the Internet, and/or connecting with business partners. The company is increasingly developing expertise in the area of fiber-optic networking as well as the concomitant expertise in multiservice networks, which offer video and voice capabilities in addition to the traditional data capability. Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984 in Menlo Park, California, by a husband and wife team from Stanford University, Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner. Bosack was the manager of the computer science department's laboratory, and Lerner oversaw the computers at the graduate school of business. At Stanford, Bosack devised a way to connect the two local area networks in the respective departments where he and his wife worked, 500 yards across campus. The company was established on a very tight budget. In fact, Bosack and Lerner had to mortgage their house, run up credit card debts, and defer salaries to their friends who worked for them in order to get the venture off the ground, and, even after two years of business, Lerner maintained an outside salaried job to supplement the couple's income. Meanwhile, Morgridge built up a direct sales force to market the products to corporate clients. At first, Cisco's corporate clients were the scientific departments of companies which already maintained large internal networks. Later, Cisco was able to market its products to all kinds of major corporations to help them link the computer systems of their headquarters, regional, and branch offices. As Cisco's client base grew, the company's greatest challenge became meeting customer support service needs. The large size of the network systems for which Cisco supplied products made the user support task especially complex. While new communications technologies became widespread, Cisco adapted and added the capabilities of handling new protocols to its products. In the fall of 1992, Cisco introduced Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and Token-Ring enhancements to its high-end router. Around the same time, the company also introduced the first Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) router for the Japanese market. Until 1992, Cisco's products had not addressed IBM's System Network Architecture (SNA), a proprietary network structure used by IBM computers. In September 1992, however, after IBM announced plans to license its Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking (APPN) protocol used for SNA, Cisco responded by announcing plans for a rival Advanced Peer-to-Peer Internetworking (APPI) protocol for supporting SNA. By August 1993, Cisco had decided not to develop a rival protocol, because IBM made it clear that APPN would be a more open, multivendor protocol than originally intended. Cisco then proceeded to work with IBM on further defining the APPN standard and bought a license