Cisco

Cisco Systems, Inc., is an American multinational technology company headquartered in San Jose, California. It is a major vendor of networking hardware, software, and services. Cisco's products enable communications within and between networks, including routing, switching, wireless, security, and collaboration.

Founded in 1984 by Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, engineers at Stanford University, the company derived its name from the city of San Francisco. It grew with the Internet’s expansion, went public in 1990, and became a leading supplier of enterprise networking equipment. Through acquisitions—Linksys (consumer networking), Cerent (1999), Scientific Atlanta (2005), WebEx (2007), Tandberg (2010), and Duo Security (2018)—Cisco broadened into data center, collaboration, and cybersecurity.

Core product lines include routers and switches, security appliances, wireless LAN, data center technologies, software-defined networking platforms (Cisco DNA Center and Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI), and collaboration solutions (WebEx). Cisco has emphasized software subscriptions, cloud management, and services to make networks programmable and secure.

Cisco operates globally with customers in enterprise, service provider, and public sector markets. It competes with Huawei, Juniper Networks, Arista Networks, and others. It is publicly traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker CSCO and is a long-standing component of major indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average.