Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. is the US transnational company working in telecommunications. The company develops and sells grid equipment.

It is one of the largest world companies specializing in high technologies. The Cisco Systems is presented by full range of grid equipments, therefore the company  calls itself “the world leader in grid technologies for Internet”.

The name of the company

The origin of the company name has interesting history. 

Current name Cisco was derived from the city name, San Francisco. By the way, the pronunciation of the name has some disputable issues. As per the English linguistics the name is pronounced as [siskəu], but majority are sure that it is  [tsiskəu].

Choosing a name of a company is a challenging task.  The founders of Cisco met the same challenge.  It has also several options. 

The first one is as follows. All harmonious and easily remembered names were occupied, therefore they had to take on and write it with small letter (by that time CISCO company was operating already in the market).   

The second suggestion, which is brought forward after analysis is this: the initial writing and reading of the company was San-Francisco Systems, but in registration process a little mistake brought in tear of the cover page with the name of the company. So there appeared the company with the name cisco Systems (with small letter).

Later the company officially changed the name into Cisco Systems, Inc. But up to now the old name periodically appears in IOS messages and error reports. 

The history of the company 

In 1984 Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer operations staff members at Stanford University founded the company on development and sell of routers of protocol.

Routers are the devices devoted for forwarding computer traffic from one network to another.  Bosack and his company practically made revolution in IT world.  They managed in creating the first commercially successful routers supporting multiple network protocols.  The device allowed previously incompatible computers communicate among while the opportunity to use different network protocols is not excluded.

 In1990 Bosack and Lerner had to leave the company: venture investors included into the management board professional managers. The capital the married couple took with them away was 170 million USD. But this amount did not save their marriage. 

Meanwhile the company was expanding and getting stronger. In1996 they bought  StrataCom Inc, which allowed Cisco to get into the market of ATM equipments. 

In 2003 Cisco purchased Linksys, which was a popular producer of computer network equipments. Currently the trademark Linksys is positioned as network equipment for home use and small business. 

In December of 2009 Cisco became the winner of more than  90% shares of Norway company Tandberg. The deal cost in 3.4 billion USD to Cisco Systems but that was worth of it: after the deal the company became the world leader of videoconference equipments. 

Also the cooperation with partners and merger with other companies allw owed the company to enter the market of IP telephony with their IP phones, call managers and common use phone network gateways.

Cisco Systems today

Today Cisco Systems is the world leader in production of active network equipments and complex solutions via which clients have opportunity to create own infrastructure or get access to local networks of other owners.  

Unchallenged president and general director of the company has been John Chambers.  He develops his business in three areas:   

• Solutions for small and medium business 
• Solutions for service providers   
• Solutions for corporative networks.  

The company distributes its products in 90 countries of the world. The headquarters of Cisco Systems is situated in San Jaos  (USA, CA).

The golden bridge is the logo of the company (suspension bridge through the Golden Gate Ferry which connects north San Francisco and south Marin county).