Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc., trading as Cisco, is an American multinational technology conglomerate that develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and related services, with a focus on networking, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
| Cisco Systems, Inc. | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | Nasdaq: CSCO |
| Industry | Networking hardware, telecommunications equipment, cybersecurity, software |
| Founded | December 1984, San Francisco, California |
| Founder | Leonard Bosack, Sandy Lerner |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Chuck Robbins (chair and CEO) |
| Products | Routers, switches, Catalyst, Nexus, Silicon One, Meraki, firewalls |
| Services | Webex, Umbrella, ThousandEyes, Splunk, AppDynamics, subscription software |
| Subsidiaries | Meraki, Splunk, Duo Security, OpenDNS, AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, Acacia |
| Website | cisco.com |
Cisco specialises in networking and adjacent markets including the Internet of Things, domain security, videoconferencing and energy management, through products such as Webex, OpenDNS, Jabber and Jasper. It is headquartered in San Jose, California, and as of June 2026 had a market capitalisation of 461 billion dollars.
The company was founded in December 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, two Stanford University computer scientists who pioneered the use of a local area network to connect distant computers through a multiprotocol router. It went public in 1990 and, at the height of the dot-com bubble in March 2000, reached a market capitalisation above 500 billion dollars, briefly surpassing Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world, before losing roughly 80 per cent of that value by 2002.
Cisco stock has traded on the Nasdaq since 1990, was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average on 8 June 2009, and is a component of the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and Russell 1000.
History
Stanford origins, 1984 to 1990
Cisco was founded in December 1984 by Sandy Lerner and her husband Leonard Bosack. Lerner was director of computer facilities at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; Bosack managed the computers of the university's computer science department.
The company's first product had its roots in Stanford's own campus technology. In the early 1980s students and staff, Bosack among them, connected the university's disparate computer systems using a device that functioned as a multiprotocol router, known as the Blue Box. It used circuitry designed by Andy Bechtolsheim and software originally written at Stanford by the research engineer William Yeager. Yeager's design scaled unusually well, and that architecture became central to Cisco's early success.
In 1985 Bosack and the Stanford employee Kirk Lougheed began a project to network the campus formally, adapting Yeager's software into what became the foundation of Cisco IOS. Yeager maintained that he had been refused permission to sell the Blue Box commercially.
The arrangement collapsed acrimoniously. On 11 July 1986 Bosack and Lougheed were forced to resign from Stanford, and the university considered filing criminal complaints against Cisco and its founders for the theft of software, hardware designs and other intellectual property. The matter was settled in 1987 when Stanford licensed the router software and two circuit boards to Cisco in exchange for a payment and equipment donations. The episode remains one of the more consequential disputes over the ownership of university-developed technology, and the software at issue underpinned a company that would later be worth more than half a trillion dollars.
The early team comprised Bosack, Lerner, Lougheed, the programmer Greg Satz and Richard Troiano, who handled sales. Bill Graves served as the first chief executive from 1987 to 1988, succeeded by John Morgridge.
The name derives from San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on the lower-case rendering cisco in its early years, and the logo is a stylised representation of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Cisco went public on 16 February 1990 with a market capitalisation of 224 million dollars. On 28 August that year Lerner was dismissed, and Bosack resigned in protest on hearing the news. The founders sold their holdings for approximately 170 million dollars, the majority of which they gave to charity, and neither played a further part in the company.
Routing, switching and the rise to dominance, 1990 to 1995
Cisco was not the first company to build dedicated network nodes, but it was among the first to sell commercially successful routers supporting multiple network protocols at a time when competing networks used incompatible standards including IP, IPX, AppleTalk and DECnet. A device that could translate between them was valuable precisely because the industry had not yet settled on one.
The classical processor-based architecture of early Cisco devices, combined with the flexibility of the IOS operating system, allowed the company to keep pace with changing requirements through frequent software upgrades rather than hardware replacement. Some models of the period, notably the Cisco 2500, remained in production for almost a decade essentially unchanged. The company moved early into the service provider market with the Cisco 7000 and 8500 lines.
Between 1992 and 1994 Cisco acquired several Ethernet switching companies, including Kalpana, Grand Junction and, most significantly, Mario Mazzola's Crescendo Communications, which together formed the Catalyst business unit. The prevailing view within the company was that layer 3 routing and layer 2 switching were complementary functions of different character, routing being slow and complex while switching was fast and simple, and this philosophy shaped its product lines throughout the decade.
John Morgridge was succeeded as chief executive by John Chambers in 1995.
The internet boom and bust, 1996 to 2005
The widespread adoption of the Internet Protocol in the mid to late 1990s placed Cisco at the centre of the infrastructure build-out. It introduced products from modem access shelves such as the AS5200 to core GSR routers, becoming the dominant supplier in the market.
In late March 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalisation above 500 billion dollars. The subsequent collapse removed 431 billion dollars of that value. The company's share price has never regained its 2000 peak, and by 2021 stood at 46.25 dollars, some 42 per cent below it, a fact frequently cited in discussions of how long a valuation established in a bubble can take to justify.
Chambers's response to the downturn was severe and rapid, cutting the workforce substantially and writing down more than two billion dollars of inventory, and the company emerged with a stronger balance sheet than most of its peers.
The perceived difficulty of implementing routing functions in silicon prompted several startups to attempt processing IP and MPLS packets entirely in hardware, blurring the distinction between routing and switching. Juniper Networks shipped its first product in 1999 and by 2000 had taken roughly 30 per cent of Cisco's service provider market share. Cisco responded by developing its own application-specific integrated circuits and fast processing cards for the GSR routers and Catalyst 6500 switches, and in 2004 began migrating to the CRS-1 platform and the IOS XR software architecture.
The Human Network and consumer expansion, 2006 to 2012
As part of a rebranding in 2006 the company shortened its name to Cisco and launched The Human Network advertising campaign, an effort to become a household brand supporting its low-end Linksys products and anticipated consumer range.
On the enterprise side it continued developing routing, switching and security. The growing importance of Ethernet, together with the limits of IOS and the ageing Crescendo architecture, led Cisco to adopt merchant silicon in the carrier Ethernet segment, producing the ASR 9000 family built on EZchip hardware and IOS XR to consolidate its carrier Ethernet and subscriber management business.
In March 2007 it acquired Reactivity, a XML gateway provider in Redwood City, placing the team under its Datacenter Switching and Security Technology Group, then reporting to senior vice president Jayshree Ullal, who later became chief executive of the competitor Arista Networks.
Cisco built a substantial presence in India during the mid-2000s, establishing its Globalization Centre East in Bangalore at a cost of one billion dollars, and expanded by acquisition, including the 2.9 billion dollar purchase of the mobile specialist Starent Networks in 2009.
Competition intensified from Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper Networks domestically and from Huawei internationally. Lower than expected profit in 2011 led Cisco to reduce annual expenses by one billion dollars, cutting around 3,000 employees through an early retirement programme and planning to eliminate as many as 10,000 positions, roughly 14 per cent of its 73,400 staff. During a 2011 analyst call Chambers named several competitors directly, including Juniper and HP.
On 24 July 2012 Cisco received European approval to acquire the television software developer NDS for five billion dollars. In 2013 it sold the Linksys home router business to Belkin, signalling a retreat from consumer products in favour of business customers.
Refocusing on software and security, 2013 to 2020
Cisco agreed to acquire the security company Sourcefire for 2.7 billion dollars on 23 July 2013. In August it announced 4,000 job cuts, roughly six per cent of its workforce, and at the end of the year reported weak revenue from emerging markets, attributed both to economic uncertainty and to fears that the National Security Agency had planted backdoors in its equipment.
In April 2014 the company established funding for early-stage Internet of Things firms, investing in accelerators and startups including The Alchemist Accelerator, Ayla Networks and EVRYTHNG, and later that year announced a further 6,000 redundancies, eight per cent of its global workforce, in a second restructuring. By July 2014 it was again among the most valuable companies at about 129 billion dollars.
On 4 May 2015 Cisco announced that Chambers would step down as chief executive on 26 July while remaining chairman, to be succeeded by Chuck Robbins, a seventeen-year veteran then serving as senior vice president of worldwide sales and operations. On 23 July 2015 the company sold its television set-top box and cable modem business to Technicolor for 600 million dollars, a division originally created by the 6.9 billion dollar purchase of Scientific Atlanta, completing its withdrawal from consumer hardware and reflecting the new leadership's emphasis on cloud and enterprise products.
In November 2015 Cisco joined ARM, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University in founding the OpenFog Consortium to promote fog computing. In January 2016 it invested in the software-defined wide area networking company VeloCloud, later acquired by VMware and subsequently by Arista.
In February 2017 Cisco launched Umbrella, a cloud-based secure internet gateway providing protected access for users not connecting through corporate networks or virtual private networks. Chambers announced in September 2017 that he would leave the executive chairmanship at the end of his board term, and on 11 December Robbins was elected to succeed him while retaining the chief executive role, Chambers taking the title chairman emeritus.
The company bought the business intelligence startup Accompany for 270 million dollars in May 2018, and in 2019 acquired the customer experience company CloudCherry and the artificial intelligence company Voicea. By June 2018 it ranked 444th on the Forbes Global 2000 with a market capitalisation of 221.3 billion dollars.
In 2019 Cisco introduced Silicon One, its own networking ASIC, with the G100 reaching 25.6 terabits per second, competing with Broadcom's Tomahawk series, Nvidia Spectrum, Marvell Teralynx and Intel Tofino. The G200, announced in 2023, offers 51.2 terabits per second.
In March 2020 the senior vice president and general manager of enterprise networking David Goeckeler left to become chief executive of Western Digital and was replaced by Todd Nightingale, head of Cisco Meraki. In August 2020 the company announced a 130,000 square foot Midwest headquarters in Chicago at the Old Chicago Main Post Office for 1,200 employees. Cisco maintains more than 200 corporate offices in over 80 countries.
Recent developments, 2021 onward
In October 2022 Cisco announced a partnership adding the Microsoft Teams application to its meeting devices, an accommodation of a competitor that had taken substantial share from Webex during the pandemic.
Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Cisco halted sales of its equipment in Russia entirely and discontinued service for devices already sold. In April 2023 it emerged that the company had destroyed equipment, spare parts, vehicles and office furniture worth 1.86 billion roubles, approximately 23 million dollars, because re-export was impossible. In February 2023 it wrote off 1.234 billion roubles owed by the Russian mobile operator MTS for earlier equipment deliveries. In 2023 it announced plans to begin manufacturing equipment in India.
On 15 February 2024 Cisco announced more than 4,000 redundancies, five per cent of its global workforce, and reduced its annual revenue forecast, citing economic conditions and weaker demand from telecommunications and cable service providers.
The most significant recent transaction was the acquisition of Splunk, completed in March 2024 for approximately 28 billion dollars, the largest purchase in the company's history. Splunk's data platform for security and observability was intended to move Cisco decisively further into software and recurring revenue, and to give it a stronger position in security operations at a point when its hardware markets were maturing.
Products
Routing
Routing remains the business Cisco was founded on. Its range spans branch office and small business routers through enterprise aggregation platforms to core service provider systems.
The ISR series serves branch and campus deployment, the ASR 1000 and 9000 families serve aggregation and carrier Ethernet, and the 8000 series and earlier CRS platforms serve provider cores. Software has migrated across successive generations from classic IOS to IOS XE for enterprise and IOS XR for service provider systems, the latter rebuilt around a modular architecture allowing individual processes to restart without taking down the device.
Switching
The Catalyst line, built from the Crescendo, Kalpana and Grand Junction acquisitions of the early 1990s, has been the company's campus switching platform for three decades and is among the most widely deployed network products in existence. The Nexus line serves data centres, introducing features such as virtual port channels and, later, the application-centric infrastructure model in which policy is expressed in terms of applications rather than ports and addresses.
Wireless and Meraki
Cisco acquired Meraki in 2012 for 1.2 billion dollars. Meraki's proposition was that network equipment should be managed entirely from a cloud dashboard rather than by command line, with devices configuring themselves on connection. It proved attractive to organisations without dedicated network engineers, and the model has since been extended across switching, security appliances and cameras. It coexists somewhat awkwardly with Cisco's traditional command-line products, which remain preferred by large enterprises.
Security
Security has become central to Cisco's strategy. The portfolio includes Secure Firewall, descended from the Sourcefire and earlier PIX and ASA products; Umbrella for cloud-delivered domain filtering, built on the OpenDNS acquisition; Duo for multi-factor authentication; Secure Endpoint; and, since 2024, Splunk for security information and event management.
Talos, the company's threat intelligence group, is among the larger private security research organisations and publishes analysis of malware campaigns and vulnerabilities, including work on state-sponsored intrusions affecting network equipment.
Collaboration
Webex, acquired in 2007, provides videoconferencing and calling, alongside a range of meeting room hardware, desk devices and headsets. The pandemic produced enormous growth in the category but also intense competition, and Webex lost substantial share to Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Cisco's response has emphasised hardware and interoperability, including support for Teams on its meeting devices, rather than attempting to win the software contest outright.
Data centre and compute
The Unified Computing System, introduced in 2009, placed Cisco in the server market and in direct competition with HP and Dell, both of which were partners at the time. The system integrated compute, networking and management, and its introduction materially changed the company's relationships across the industry.
More recently Cisco has positioned itself around artificial intelligence infrastructure, supplying the Ethernet fabrics that connect accelerator clusters, in a segment where InfiniBand and Nvidia's networking products are the principal alternative.
Silicon
Silicon One, announced in 2019, is a unified networking chip architecture intended to serve both routing and switching roles from a common design, reversing the long-standing separation between the two. The G100 reached 25.6 terabits per second and the G200 51.2 terabits per second. The strategic aim is to reduce dependence on merchant silicon from Broadcom, which supplies many of Cisco's competitors, and to compete for hyperscale customers that had increasingly bought bare hardware rather than integrated systems.
The 2021 acquisition of Acacia Communications added coherent optical technology, extending the company into the optics that carry traffic between data centres.
Certification
Cisco operates one of the most influential professional certification programmes in any industry. The tiers run from CCNA at associate level through CCNP at professional level to CCIE at expert level, the last requiring an eight-hour practical laboratory examination with a historically low pass rate.
The programme's significance extends beyond the company. For much of the past three decades a Cisco certification has functioned as the standard credential for network engineers, shaping curricula, hiring practice and the vocabulary of the profession. It also produces a substantial installed preference: engineers trained on Cisco equipment tend to specify it, which is a competitive advantage no product feature confers.
Business model
Cisco's historical model was to sell hardware at high margin with perpetual software bundled, supported by an enormous channel of resellers and integrators.
That model has been under pressure for a decade. Customers move workloads to public cloud providers that build their own infrastructure; white-box switching running open network operating systems offers a cheaper alternative for hyperscale buyers; and software-defined networking decouples control from hardware.
The response has been a transition toward subscription software and recurring revenue, pursued through acquisition rather than internal development, and the proportion of revenue arising from software and services has risen substantially. The Splunk purchase was the largest single step in that direction.
Acquisitions
Cisco has acquired more than 200 companies, and acquisition has been its principal mechanism for entering new markets since the early 1990s. Notable purchases include Crescendo Communications in 1993, which established switching; StrataCom in 1996; Cerent in 1999 for 6.9 billion dollars in optical networking; Scientific Atlanta in 2005 for 6.9 billion dollars in set-top boxes, later divested; WebEx in 2007 for 3.2 billion dollars; Starent Networks in 2009; Tandberg in 2010 for videoconferencing; Meraki in 2012; NDS in 2012; Sourcefire in 2013; OpenDNS in 2015; AppDynamics in 2017 for 3.7 billion dollars, agreed days before that company's planned flotation; Duo Security in 2018 for 2.35 billion dollars; ThousandEyes in 2020; Acacia in 2021; and Splunk in 2024 for approximately 28 billion dollars.
The record is mixed. Several acquisitions, notably Crescendo, WebEx and Meraki, became large and durable businesses. Others, including Scientific Atlanta, Linksys, the Flip video camera business bought with Pure Digital in 2009 and closed in 2011, and the Umi home telepresence product, were written off or divested within a few years, and the consumer strategy of the late 2000s was abandoned entirely.
Competition
Cisco's competitive position differs by segment. In enterprise campus networking it competes with Arista Networks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise through Aruba and Juniper, and with Huawei outside the United States. In data centre switching Arista has taken substantial share among cloud and financial customers. In service provider routing Juniper and Nokia are the principal rivals. In security it faces Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, CrowdStrike and Microsoft. In collaboration it competes with Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
The most structurally significant competition comes from customers rather than vendors. The largest cloud operators design their own switches, write their own network software and buy merchant silicon directly, removing themselves from Cisco's addressable market entirely. That shift, more than any single competitor, explains the company's move toward software and subscription.
Operations
Cisco employs roughly 90,000 people and maintains more than 200 offices in over 80 countries. Manufacturing is largely outsourced to contract manufacturers, with the company concentrating on design, software and supply chain management, and it has announced manufacturing in India as part of a broader diversification away from concentration in China.
Its headquarters occupies a large campus in San Jose, with other major sites in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, Richardson in Texas, Bangalore, Krakow and Chicago.
Financial performance
Cisco generates annual revenue in the region of 50 to 57 billion dollars, with gross margins historically in the mid-60s per cent, high for a hardware business and reflecting the software content of its products and the strength of its position in enterprise networking.
The company holds substantial cash, returns capital through dividends and buybacks, and has pursued acquisitions largely from its own resources. Growth has been modest for many years, and the investment case has rested on cash generation and the subscription transition rather than on expansion.
Controversies
National Security Agency interdiction
Documents disclosed by Edward Snowden and reported in 2014 described a National Security Agency programme under which equipment shipments, including Cisco routers and switches, were intercepted in transit, fitted with implants and repackaged before delivery to overseas customers.
Cisco stated that it had no knowledge of and did not cooperate with the programme, and its then general counsel wrote to President Barack Obama objecting that such activity undermined confidence in American technology exports. The disclosures nonetheless damaged sales in emerging markets, a factor the company itself cited in its weak results at the end of 2013, and they contributed materially to the willingness of governments outside the United States to favour domestic suppliers.
Equipment used for censorship and surveillance in China
Cisco has faced sustained criticism and litigation over the sale of networking equipment used in China's internet filtering and surveillance systems, known as the Golden Shield Project.
In Doe v. Cisco Systems, practitioners of Falun Gong alleged that the company had knowingly designed and marketed equipment tailored to the identification and suppression of the group, pointing to internal marketing material that referred to combating what Chinese authorities termed evil cults. Cisco argued that it sold standard commercial products available worldwide and did not customise them for persecution. A district court dismissed the case; the Ninth Circuit revived significant claims in 2023, holding that aiding and abetting liability could be pleaded, and litigation continued.
A parallel case brought by Chinese dissidents in Maryland was dismissed. The episode is a standard reference in debates about the responsibility of technology vendors for foreseeable uses of general-purpose equipment.
Security vulnerabilities and hardcoded credentials
Because Cisco equipment sits at the centre of most enterprise and carrier networks, vulnerabilities in it carry unusual consequence. The company has disclosed numerous serious flaws, including hardcoded credentials and undocumented accounts in several product lines, authentication bypasses in its security appliances, and weaknesses exploited by state-sponsored actors.
In 2018 a critical hardcoded password was found in Cisco's video surveillance manager, and comparable defaults have been discovered in other products. Advisories from the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and from the United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre have repeatedly warned of Russian and Chinese state actors targeting Cisco devices, in some cases exploiting equipment left unpatched years after fixes were published.
The company operates a coordinated disclosure process and publishes advisories on a fixed schedule, and its Talos group researches attacks on its own products, but critics note that the volume of hardcoded credential findings suggests a development practice problem rather than isolated errors.
Huawei litigation
In 2003 Cisco sued Huawei alleging that the Chinese manufacturer had copied its router software source code, documentation and command line interface, supported by identical bugs and identical typographical errors appearing in Huawei manuals.
Huawei removed the disputed code, modified its products and the case was settled in 2004. The dispute is frequently cited as an early and well-documented instance of intellectual property transfer in the sector, and also as the beginning of a commercial rivalry in which Huawei subsequently overtook Cisco in global telecommunications equipment revenue.
Arista litigation
Cisco sued Arista Networks in 2014 over the copying of its command line interface and certain patented features, a case complicated by the fact that Arista had been founded by former Cisco personnel including Jayshree Ullal and Andy Bechtolsheim, whose circuitry had contributed to the original Blue Box.
A jury accepted a fair use defence on the copyright claim in 2016, and in 2018 Arista paid Cisco 400 million dollars to settle all matters, with both companies agreeing a five-year stand-down. The case raised the broader question of whether the conventions of a command line interface, which network engineers learn once and use across a career, can be owned.
Employment practices
Cisco has conducted repeated large-scale redundancies, including in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2020, 2023, 2024 and 2025, frequently while reporting profits and conducting share buybacks, which has drawn criticism from employees and commentators.
In 2020 the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing brought an action alleging caste-based discrimination against a Cisco employee of Dalit background by two managers, the first such case brought in the United States. The case drew wide attention for raising caste as a protected characteristic in American employment law, and proceedings against the company were subsequently dropped while claims against the individuals continued.
Accounting and tax
Cisco settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2007 over the accounting treatment of stock option grants, part of the industry-wide backdating investigations of that period. Brazilian authorities pursued the company over alleged tax evasion through an import scheme in 2007, allegations Cisco denied and which were subsequently reduced.
Product lifecycle practices
Customers have criticised the pace at which Cisco declares products end of life and the cost of the support contracts required to receive software updates and security patches, a model that places organisations running older equipment in the position of either paying indefinitely or operating without fixes. The pattern of unpatched Cisco devices exploited in state-sponsored campaigns is connected to this: a substantial proportion of the vulnerable population is out of support.
Counterfeit equipment
Cisco hardware is among the most widely counterfeited technology products in the world, a consequence of high margins, strong brand recognition and a large secondary market in which buyers seek genuine equipment at a discount.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation ran Operation Cisco Raider from 2005, which resulted in dozens of convictions and the seizure of counterfeit equipment worth tens of millions of dollars. A significant proportion of the seized hardware had been sold to government buyers, including the Department of Defense, the Marine Corps, the Air Force and the FBI itself, through resellers who had bought from unauthorised distributors.
The concern was not only commercial. Counterfeit network equipment installed in sensitive networks presents an obvious avenue for interception or sabotage, whether or not the counterfeiters themselves intended it, and a leaked FBI presentation on the operation discussed that possibility explicitly. In practice most seized units appeared to be straightforward commercial fraud, typically substandard clones of low-end switches and interface cards.
In 2022 a Florida reseller was sentenced for importing counterfeit Cisco equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars at list price from China and Hong Kong, much of it modified with pirated software and sold to hospitals, schools and government agencies.
Cisco has responded with holographic labels, cryptographic identity chips embedded in its hardware, a brand protection unit that works with customs authorities, and tooling allowing customers to verify serial numbers. The underlying difficulty persists: a large installed base, long equipment lifetimes and price-sensitive buyers sustain a secondary market that counterfeiters can enter.
Dependence on the channel
Cisco sells predominantly through resellers, distributors and integrators rather than directly, a structure that gave it enormous reach as networking spread through the enterprise market but which also inserts intermediaries between the company and its customers.
The arrangement has drawn criticism on several grounds: pricing opacity, since end customers rarely see list prices that bear any relation to what they pay; the incentive for partners to favour whichever vendor offers the best margin at a given moment; and the difficulty of policing the grey market in which genuine equipment intended for one region is sold into another at lower prices. The counterfeiting problem is partly a consequence of the same structure.
Competitors selling directly, and cloud providers that bypass the channel entirely, do not carry these costs, which is part of why the economics of the industry have moved against the traditional model.
Russia
Cisco's complete withdrawal from Russia in 2022 was among the more thorough exits by a large technology company, extending to the termination of service for equipment already sold and the physical destruction of unsellable stock. The write-off of MTS debt and the destruction of 1.86 billion roubles of assets were unusual steps, and the decision was contrasted favourably with companies that reduced but maintained a presence.
Leadership
- Bill Graves, 1987 to 1988
- John Morgridge, 1988 to 1995
- John Chambers, 1995 to 2015, chairman to 2017, then chairman emeritus
- Chuck Robbins, from 2015, also chairman from December 2017
Chambers's twenty-year tenure covered the company's rise to the most valuable in the world, the collapse of that valuation and the consolidation that followed, and he became among the most visible executives in the industry. Robbins has concentrated on the transition to software and subscription and on security, of which the Splunk acquisition is the clearest expression.
Technologies and standards
Cisco has originated or popularised a number of networking technologies, some of which became industry standards and some of which remained proprietary and were superseded.
EIGRP, the Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol, was proprietary for two decades and widely deployed in enterprise networks before the company published it as an informational standard in 2013, by which time OSPF had become the usual choice for multi-vendor environments.
HSRP, the Hot Standby Router Protocol, provided gateway redundancy and was effectively standardised in modified form as VRRP. CDP, the Cisco Discovery Protocol, allowed devices to identify their neighbours and was paralleled by the standard LLDP. PAgP for link aggregation was superseded by LACP.
The pattern is consistent and revealing: Cisco solved problems ahead of the standards bodies, customers adopted the proprietary solution because it worked, and a standard version followed that eroded the resulting lock-in. The company's influence on the vocabulary and operating conventions of networking is greater than its influence on the formal standards themselves.
In voice, Cisco was central to the displacement of traditional private branch exchanges by IP telephony, and its acquisition of Selsius in 1998 began a business that made it one of the largest suppliers of enterprise telephony in the world.
More recently it has contributed to open source and open standards work including OpenDaylight for software-defined networking control, the OpenConfig data models, and the P4 programmable data plane community, in each case partly in response to customers who did not wish to be dependent on a single vendor's management interfaces.
Cisco Networking Academy
Founded in 1997, the Networking Academy provides networking curricula to schools, colleges and community organisations worldwide. It has instructed many millions of students across more than 180 countries, and in many places it is the principal route into a technical career for people without access to university education.
Its purpose is not disinterested. The programme creates a supply of engineers trained on Cisco equipment and conventions, which in turn shapes what those engineers specify when they enter the profession. Whether it is best understood as education or as the most effective marketing programme in the history of the industry is a question raised regularly, and the two readings are not mutually exclusive: the training is genuine, freely available and valuable to those who receive it, and it also entrenches the company's position.
Cisco Live
Cisco Live, held annually in the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia, is among the larger technology conferences, combining product announcements with several thousand hours of technical training and certification examinations. It functions as the principal gathering point of the professional community formed by the certification programme.
Environmental record
Cisco has committed to net zero greenhouse gas emissions across all scopes by 2040, including emissions arising from the use of its products, which for a manufacturer of always-on network equipment represents by far the largest share of its footprint.
It operates a takeback and recycling programme, refurbishes returned equipment for resale through Cisco Refresh, and has increased the proportion of recycled content and the energy efficiency of successive product generations. Power consumption is a genuine constraint in its markets: the density of modern switching and the growth of artificial intelligence clusters have made electrical draw and cooling a primary purchasing consideration rather than a secondary one.
Critics note that the company's product lifecycle practices, which encourage replacement of equipment that remains functional, sit uneasily with its circular economy commitments.
Brand
The name derives from San Francisco and the logo depicts the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, rendered as a series of vertical bars that also suggest a signal or waveform. The lower-case rendering used in the company's early years was abandoned in the 2006 rebranding.
The Human Network campaign of that period attempted to reposition an infrastructure supplier as a consumer-facing brand, in support of a consumer strategy that was subsequently abandoned. Marketing since has returned to enterprise buyers, with recent emphasis on security and on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Corporate affairs
Cisco's board has generally drawn directors from technology, finance and public service. Shareholder proposals in recent years have addressed human rights due diligence in connection with equipment sales to authoritarian governments, lobbying disclosure, and the environmental impact of products, several attracting significant minority support.
Executive compensation has occasionally been contested, particularly in years combining redundancies with substantial buybacks and stock awards.
The company has been an active corporate venture investor for three decades, and its investments have frequently preceded acquisitions, giving it visibility of emerging technologies and, in several cases, a call on companies before competitors could bid.
Timeline
- 1984: Founded by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner
- 1986: Bosack and Lougheed forced to resign from Stanford over the software dispute
- 1987: Stanford licenses the router software to Cisco
- 1990: Initial public offering; Lerner dismissed and Bosack resigns
- 1993: Crescendo Communications acquired, establishing the Catalyst switching line
- 1995: John Chambers becomes chief executive
- 1997: Networking Academy founded
- 2000: Becomes the most valuable company in the world, above 500 billion dollars
- 2003: Sues Huawei over copied router software; settled 2004
- 2005: Scientific Atlanta acquired for 6.9 billion dollars
- 2006: Renamed Cisco; The Human Network campaign
- 2009: Added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average; Unified Computing System launched
- 2012: Meraki acquired
- 2013: Sourcefire acquired; Linksys sold
- 2014: NSA interdiction of shipments reported
- 2015: Chuck Robbins succeeds Chambers
- 2019: Silicon One announced
- 2022: Complete withdrawal from Russia
- 2024: Splunk acquired for approximately 28 billion dollars
See also
References