The quiet backbone of the internet - forty years of routers, switches, and now the networks that feed artificial intelligence.
In December 1984, two computer scientists at Stanford University wanted their two campus labs to talk to each other. Leonard Bosack ran the computing facility for one department; Sandy Lerner ran another. They were married, and their offices used networks that could not communicate. Bosack, adapting router technology that Stanford engineers had sketched out in the 1970s, built a device that could pass data between them. The couple soon realized the same trick could work far beyond one campus - and Cisco Systems was born, its name a shortening of San Francisco, its logo a stylized nod to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Four decades later, Cisco is the largest networking company in the world. Its routers and switches sit in server closets, data centers, telecom exchanges, and government facilities on every continent. Most people never see the equipment or think about it, which is precisely the point. When your product becomes infrastructure, it becomes invisible - and hard to remove.
At its core, Cisco answers one durable question: how do you move data from here to there, quickly and securely? The company builds the hardware that routes and switches network traffic, the silicon inside that hardware, the security tools that protect it, the software that monitors it, and the collaboration platforms that run on top of it. If a large company connects offices, runs a data center, protects itself from cyberattacks, or holds a video meeting, there is a reasonable chance Cisco technology is somewhere in the stack.
Cisco sells to almost everyone who runs a serious network: large enterprises, telecom and internet service providers, hyperscale cloud operators, governments, universities, hospitals, and small businesses. It reaches them largely through a vast ecosystem of certified channel partners and resellers rather than selling everything directly. Beyond buyers, Cisco has a second constituency that few technology companies can match - the millions of IT professionals who learned their trade on Cisco gear and carry Cisco certifications like the CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE. That trained workforce is a business advantage as much as any product.
Networks are where three hard problems meet: connectivity, security, and visibility. Data has to reach its destination reliably. It has to be protected from a constantly shifting set of threats. And someone has to be able to see what is happening when things break. Cisco has spent its history stitching these together - routers and switches for connectivity, firewalls and threat intelligence for security, and, increasingly, observability tools for visibility. Its 2024 acquisition of Splunk, the machine-data analytics company, was a roughly $28 billion bet that security and observability are ultimately the same job: making sense of the data the network already sees.
Cisco does not lack competitors. In core networking it faces Arista Networks and Juniper (now part of HPE); in AI data-center networking it is increasingly measured against Arista and Nvidia; in security it competes with Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and CrowdStrike; in collaboration with Zoom and Microsoft Teams; and in observability with Datadog and others. Few rivals, though, compete across all of those fronts at once.
That breadth is the differentiator. A specialist can beat Cisco in any single category, but Cisco's pitch is the integrated whole - one vendor spanning the network, the security layered on it, and the data flowing through it. Add the switching cost of an installed base measured in decades, a certified workforce trained on its products, and custom Silicon One chips that let it control its own hardware roadmap, and the moat is less about any one product than about position. Cisco sits between everything and everything else.
The Catalyst, Nexus, and 8000/N9000 hardware that routes and switches traffic across networks and data centers.
Firewalls, secure access, and one of the largest commercial threat-intelligence operations in the industry.
Security and observability analytics for machine data, now central to Cisco's monitoring strategy.
Cloud video meetings, calling, messaging, and contact-center software used across the remote-work era.
Silicon One / G300 chips and N9000 and 8000 systems built to connect GPUs in AI back-end fabrics.
Cloud-managed networking (Meraki) and internet/cloud performance intelligence (ThousandEyes).
For most of its life Cisco was a hardware company: sell the box, sell the support contract, repeat. Over the past decade it has deliberately shifted toward recurring revenue - security, observability, collaboration, and networking software sold as subscriptions - while still selling routers, switches, servers, and its own silicon. Financing and professional services layer on top, and the whole thing flows largely through a global partner channel rather than a direct sales force alone.
Where does it fit in the market? Cisco is the incumbent backbone. It is not usually the flashiest name in any single category, and it does not try to be. Its role is to be the default - the safe, broadly capable platform that large organizations standardize on. In the current cycle, that position is being tested and rewarded at once: AI has created enormous demand for the networking that connects GPU clusters, and Cisco raised its FY2026 AI-infrastructure forecast from hyperscalers to about $4 billion as orders climbed.
Under Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins, who took over from long-time chief John Chambers in 2015, Cisco has leaned into that repositioning: from boxes to subscriptions, from networking alone to security and data, and now toward AI. The company that briefly became the most valuable business on earth at the dot-com peak in 2000 is writing a long second act - one built on the same durable question it started with.
Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner incorporate Cisco Systems on December 10 in San Jose.
Cisco begins selling the routers that would define enterprise and internet networking.
Don Valentine's Sequoia backs the company and installs professional management.
Cisco goes public; co-founder Lerner is ousted and Bosack departs soon after.
At the dot-com peak, Cisco briefly becomes the most valuable public company on earth.
Robbins succeeds John Chambers and steers Cisco toward software and security.
Cisco completes its roughly $28 billion purchase of Splunk, its largest deal ever.
Networking and AI orders surge; Cisco guides FY26 revenue near $63 billion.
"Cisco" is short for San Francisco, and the logo's vertical bars evoke the Golden Gate Bridge - and, some say, a signal pattern.
Bosack and Lerner were married when they started the company. Both had left Cisco by 1990.
At the height of the dot-com era in 2000, Cisco was briefly the most valuable company in the world.
Cisco has made hundreds of acquisitions - one of the most active buy-and-integrate strategies in tech.
Explore Cisco leadership talks, product demonstrations, and keynotes on the company's official channel.
Cisco designs and sells networking hardware (routers, switches, silicon), cybersecurity, observability, and collaboration software, plus supporting services - the infrastructure that moves and secures data across enterprises and the internet.
Cisco was founded in 1984 in San Jose, California, by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, two computer scientists from Stanford University.
Chuck Robbins has served as Chairman and CEO since 2015, succeeding long-time CEO John Chambers.
Cisco acquired Splunk in 2024 for about $28 billion to strengthen its position in security and observability, treating network data and threat detection as a combined platform.
Cisco builds the networking silicon and systems that connect GPUs in AI data centers, has raised its FY2026 AI infrastructure revenue forecast to around $4 billion, and is embedding AI-driven security across its portfolio.