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Cisco – Journey from developing a simple router to becoming pro in networking and telecommunication sector

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The present world we are living in is complex, and much progress, and more communicative. While advanced networking is responsible to connect us to any corner of the world. However, many firms working in this field made communication easier, and more efficient. Cisco Systems is doing an excellent job since its foundation. It is set up in 1984 by a scientist at Stanford University, who also contribute to connecting computers at the university. That is Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner. Today, the firm has counted in the leading companies that manufacture world-class network infrastructure. As well, the firm explored its business all over the world. Currently, it is having more than 75K employees and networking experts. 

About Cisco System

A USA based multinational company Cisco is headquartered in San Jose in California. Recently in 2020, Cisco ranked fourth as per the Fortune Magazine. Thus, became the part of 100 best companies to work for in 2020. However, the firm is well known for manufacturing both software and hardware for network infrastructure. As well as manufactures high-tech products and telecom equipment that are known as promising in the international market. Apart from being expertise in the networking field, it also specializes in explicit tech markets. Such as domain security, IoT, and energy management. Jabber, Webex, OpenDNS, Jasper, etc are leading subsidiaries that Cisco acquired to compete in the changing market.

The backstory of foundation

As said earlier, Cisco is born out of the unique idea of computer scientists at Stanford University. As per the part of the research and need to connect computers they created the technology on the campus. For this, the founder Leonard and Sandy developed a router called ‘Blue Box’. With this, each computer could communicate with other computers easily. It was no doubt a small size network infrastructure, later on, shaped as Cisco system in 1984. As a matter of fact, the idea of the name “Cisco” has come from the city name San Francisco.

However, the firm had gone through lots of hurdles in the initial days. During the first phase of development, the founders unfortunately were accused of stealing the idea. This matter closed after both of them resigned from the firm. No matter what, but the firm has offered miscellaneous service in the networking field. In fact, it was the first firm to introduced multiple network protocol routers in the market. After 1990, Cisco expanded the business with the acquisition of several leading companies like OpenDNS, Webex, etc.

Glimpse on founders’ lives

Bosack and Learner build the base of the Cisco system with the implementation of research of William Yeager’s. For this, they had to face lots of hustles. Even both of them accused of stealing the idea, software, and hardware design. This dispute ends after leaving the firm that they build with great vision. Though, they played an applausive role in Cisco’s establishment that today known as one of the leading companies all over the world.  

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Cisco Founders: Leonard Bosack, Sandy Lerner
Image Source: fortune.com

Leonard Bosack 

Despite belonging to a catholic family, Bosack was interested in technology. He attended La Salle College High School. Thereafter, he went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduation. Leonard then joined a digital equipment corporation just after his graduation. During this job, he found interest in network technology. To follow his interest and to work in this field, he registered at Sandford University in computer science. While studying at Stanford, he met Sandy learner, who later became his partner in life as well as in business.

Sandy Lerner 

She is hailed from North California, attended California State University for under graduation. Thereafter, Sandy attended Claremont Graduate School to study econometrics. As well, she also went to Stanford University to study statistics and computer science. In 1984, Lerner’s cooperation resulted in the formation of the Cisco system.

Later Success of Cisco

After lots of up-downs, the firm went public meanwhile. Thereafter, it started the expansion of the business all over the world including India. The firm has never compromised its products and services. As well, it evolved as per changing technology and appropriately noted the requirements of the market from time to time. To advance in and achieved supremacy in modern technology, the firm used an acquisition strategy. ParStream, AppDynamics, Lancope, Accompany these are some of the noticeable acquisitions that Cisco made.

 

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Serving Up Those Domains: How This Company Got So Big It Caught Cisco’s Attention

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The Internet is an ever-changing environment with a lot of features and threats. Since the internet age started, more services have been shifting to digital platforms to grow and expand. Therefore, companies that provide services related to the internet have grown substantially in the last two decades. Today, we will be looking at one such company. Here’s how OpenDNS grew to become a multi-million-dollar business in the field of domain services.

What the Company Does

OpenDNS stands for Open Domain Name System. The company provides features such as protection against phishing content filtering. OpenDNS also has a product named Umbrella, which has tools providing cloud computing security. This product suite protects enterprise companies from all kinds of digital attacks including phishing, malware, and botnets. OpenDNS handles over 100 billion DNS queries daily and boasts of more than 85 million users around the world.

About the Founder

David Ulevitch grew up in Del Mar, California and showed an early interest in computers. He worked for a regional ISP, named ElectriCiti before starting high school. It was from here that he picked up his interest in network administration. While Ulevitch was at Washington University, he created EveryDNS to manage his DNS needs. The company grew from being a project to a company with over 100,000 users. In 2010, Dyn, Inc acquired EveryDNS. 

Launching OpenDNS

Launched in 2006, OpenDNS came to life due to the efforts of computer scientist David Ulevitch. The initial funding for the company came via venture capitalists like CNET founder, Halsey Minor. Later that year, they launched PhishTank. The service allows users to submit suspected phishing sites. The other members could then review these sites and decide whether it was a scam. 

In 2007, OpenDNS started a domain-blocking service to help users block and allow access to various sites. The categories of sites blocked worked on individually managed blacklists and whitelists that the company controlled. A year later, OpenDNS made the list community-driven allowing subscribers to suggest websites. If the site suggested got enough votes, then the site became a part of the blacklist, and subsequently blocked. By 2014, the list had grown and included over 60 categories. The former head of VMware, Nand Mulchandan joined OpenDNS as CEO in 2008, replacing David Ulevitch, who became the CTO. He resumed as CEO again in late 2009.

Continued Success 

Two years after launching the free DNS-O-Matic, they launched a premium service called Home VIP. The same year, in 2009, DNS started its foray into the world of enterprise network security through OpenDNS Enterprise. The suite included access managers, audit logs, statistic reports, and customized block page URLs. This product expanded in 2012 through the launch of OpenDNS Insights.

The new service integrated with Microsoft Active Directory, allowing admins granular control. The World Economic Forum named them a Technology Pioneer in 2011. Former CTO of Websense joined OpenDNS as CTO in 2012. Later that year, the company launched the Security Labs for research. They raised over $35 million via a Series C funding led by Glynn Capita, Northgate Capital and Cisco. 

Forming Umbrella

Their biggest launch came in 2012, in the form of Umbrella. The software helped enforce security guidelines for roaming devices like laptops, iPhones, iPads, and tablets. A year later, they came out with the OpenDNS Security Graph to further extend Umbrella. The same year, they introduced the Investigate feature which allowed teams to compare traffic data. Another feature came in 2014 via Intelligent Proxy, which provides proxies for suspicious domains.

Merger with Cisco

Owing to their massive success, industry giant Cisco acquired them in 2015, for US$635 million. The entire deal occurred via an all-cash transaction, and also included incentives for OpenDNS. After the acquisition, the company’s services became Cisco Umbrella, whereas home products remained under the OpenDNS name. Cisco clarified that they would continue developing cloud-based OpenDNS products. The company also mentioned that all existing services would be continued. After the acquisition, Ulevitch became the Senior VP and GM of Cisco’s Security Business in 2016. Two years later, he joined Andreessen Horowitz as a Partner. The company also mentioned that all existing services would be continued. After the acquisition, Ulevitch became the Senior VP and GM of Cisco’s Security Business in 2016. Two years later, he joined Andreessen Horowitz as a Partner. 

Ulevitch grew OpenDNS to become the world’s largest DNS service provider. The acquisition by Cisco is a testament to their growth and success in the field of security architecture.

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CISCO SYSTEMS, A BLESSING IN THE SPHERE OF TELECOMMUNICATION AND NETWORKING

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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.

Leonard Bosack : Pioneer of the Commercialization of Routing Technology

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The ousted co-founder of Cisco Systems, who is known for pioneering the widespread commercialization of local area network (LAN) technology, is an American computer scientist, who linked 5,000 computers across a 16-square-mile (41 km2) campus area, at the time when it even connecting the computers of two different buildings was an unheard thing.

Early Life

Bosack was born in 1952, in Pennsylvania. He completed his school education from La Salle College High School in 1969 and joined the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania to get a bachelor’s degree. After graduating, Bosack joined DEC as a hardware engineer. But, as he had applied in the Stanford University for higher education, he left his job, to join the university to pursue computer science, as soon he got accepted in the university.

Leonard Bosack
Image Source: therichestimages.com

In 1981, while studying at the Standford University, he was appointed as the support engineer for a project to connect all of Stanford’s mainframes, minis, LISP machines and Altos. At the university, he met his future wife and partner, Sandy Lerner. Lerner was working as the director of computer facilities for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The two started dating, and the couple got married in 1980.

Founding Cisco

While working as the support engineer for Standford University, Bosack, along with his wife, started experimenting on the same, secretly at his home using Stanford’s network. The two worked as partners and invented an Advanced Gateway Server; the revised version of the Stanford router built by William Yeager and Andy Bechtolsheim. To commercialise the router, they founded Cisco Systems and received the license for selling the router. The company was named on after the city San Francisco.

The router was able to effectively connect different hardware, like an Apple Macintosh, Unix workstation as well as an IBM mainframe, supporting multiple protocols. According to the legends, the Bosack and Lerner had invented the first such router to connect the computers of two different buildings of Stanford University, that used different networks, so that they could share emails through it.

For the first two years of the company, Bosack operated it from the garage of his house, and the medium of marketing was word of mouth. Despite, he was able to get contracts worth $200,000, only in the first month of starting the company. As the company was growing, Bosack appointed Greg Satz and Richard Troiano, for programming and for sales for the company, respectively.

In the year 1988, venture capitalist Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital invested $2 million in the start-up, and the company focused on the bigger commercial market. In 1990, the company went public, generating $70 million annual revenue. Sequoia Capital, having a share in the company, appointed John Morgridge as the new CEO of the company. The step was taken to increase the company growth. The joining of the new CEO also made Bosack and Lerner quit the company. At the time they left the company, they had two-thirds of the stakes in Cisco, which they sold for about $170 million dollars.

Personal Life

Bosack and Lerner got divorced in 1990. Currently, Bosack is retired and living in his home state of Pennsylvania. For his contribution to the field of computer science, he won the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2009. For a long period of time, he held a significant position in the companies like AT&T Bell Labs and Digital Equipment Corporation. He also played a key role in the development of emerging network technology driven by the U.S. Department of Defense. He also gets the credits for creating new in-line fibre optic amplification systems, capable of obtaining unprecedented data transmission latency speeds of 6.071 milliseconds over 1231 kilometres of fibre.

Bosack along with his ex-wife Lerner, founded a charitable organisation, with the 70% of the money they received after selling their Cisco stocks. The foundation works towards animal welfare and finances various science projects.