Smart and advanced networking is what connects the world more efficient today transferring data within a fraction of second. There are many huge companies that today sells product both software and hardware-based on telecommunication engineering. Cisco Systems is one such company, in fact, one of the biggest multinational conglomerates with more than 74,000 employees around the globe. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California with Chuck Robbins as the current Chairman and CEO of the company. Cisco was founded in 10th December 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner.
About the founders
Born into a Catholic family in Pennsylvania, Bosack went to La Salle College High School followed by Wharton School in 1973. He pursued his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and right after graduating joined Digital Equipment Corporation. Bosack worked there as a hardware engineer and he was highly interested in networking. Bosack went to Stanford University to study Computer Science where he started working under a project dealing with the network router. During this time, he met Lerner at the Business School Lab and both of them got married.
Lerner was from North California and received her undergraduate degree from California State University. In 1977, she graduated from Claremont Graduate School with a Master’s in econometrics after which she went to Stanford and received another Master’s degree in Statistics and Computer Science. Since both of them were working on the same project of managing a computer network, they started working in their home and developing routers from scratch. They turned their garage into an office and finally co-founded Cisco in 1984.
Early History of Cisco
Since both of them were a part of Stanford University, they started there early research and development in the campus itself. In 1984, the couple created a technology that helped to communicate each computer of Stanford with each other through a multiprotocol router called “Blue Box”. Even before the company barely scratched the surface the co-founders were accused of replicating ideas and software in 1986. After going through a lot of hustle-bustle the company finally went public in February 1990 and was added in the NASDAQ stock exchange. The legal disputes of Cisco finally ended in August 1990 when Lerner was fired along with his husband signing off from the company.
Cisco was the first company in the tech industry to sell routers with multiple network protocols making that a very big advantage for the company. The company made an impressive amount of acquisitions in the 1990s which includes companies like Stratacom and Current Corporation. Even when the dot-com boom crushed the market, Cisco stood still as one of the most valuable companies with it’s market value rounding up to $500 billion.
Intermediate Phase of Cisco
Once Cisco started expanding around the world, it also established firm roots on the market of India as well. The company established a Globalization Centre in Bangalore spending around $1 billion for it. In the year 2011, the company started cutting expenditures strictly as the profit wasn’t up to the mark. Around 3,000 employees were eliminated through early retirement plans and the $1 billion was cut from the annual expenses of the company.
Present-day Cisco with Chuck Robbins
Chuck Robbins joined Cisco in 1997 as an Account Manager but once he reached the executive position, he brought an entirely new era for the realm of Cisco. He brought cloud computing to the company threading to the networking tech of Cisco and more advanced software. Robbins after becoming the CEO of the company in 2015, mainly focused I two things, cloud computing and software-subscription revenue. Robbin’s main motive was to bring more modernization into the company by both updating their products as well as methods of getting things done. Besides cloud computing, Robbins also promoted fog computing in his company and founded OpenFog Consortium with ARM Holdings, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University.
After the mid-2015, Cisco acquired companies like ParStream, Lancope, and AppDynamics etc. With advancing in the field of modern tech, Robbins didn’t step back from delving into the segment of AI and ML which made him acquire Accompany, an AI-based start-up for $270 million.
The company has been featured several times in several business magazines which include Cisco securing 444th rank in the list of Forbes Global 2000. The company had total equity of $43.2 billion in 2018.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more