Cisco Systems, Inc. ( , ) is a
multinational corporation with
more than 65,000 employees and annual revenue of
US$36.10 billion as of 2009.
Headquartered in San Jose,
California
, it designs and sells networking and communications
technology and services.
Cisco's stock was added to the
Dow Jones Industrial Average on
June 8, 2009. It replaced
General
Motors which had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
In fiscal year 2009, Cisco realized $13.50 billion in network
services sales (mostly from “
SMARTnet”), of which $7 billion was revenue for
2009 and the remaining $6.50 billion is documented as deferred
revenue for multi-year SMARTnet service contracts. Network
maintenance services now accounts for 20% of Cisco's annual
revenue—an all-time high.
Corporate history
One of the many buildings on the Cisco
Systems campus in San Jose
Len Bosack and Sandy
Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer operations
staff at Stanford
University
, later joined by Richard
Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner
moved on to direct computer services at
Schlumberger, moving full time to Cisco in
1987. The name "Cisco" was derived from the city name, San
Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on using
the lower case "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's first
product, Bosack adapted multiple-
protocol router
software originally written some years before by
William Yeager, another Stanford employee who
later joined
Sun
Microsystems.
While Cisco was not the first company to develop and sell a
router, it was one of the first to sell
commercially successful routers supporting multiple network
protocols. As the
Internet
Protocol (IP) became widely adopted, the importance of
multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's largest routers are
primarily used to deliver
IP
packets and
MPLS frames.
In 1990, the company was listed on the
Nasdaq
stock exchange. Lerner was fired; as a result Bosack quit after
receiving $200 million. Most of those profits were given to
charities and the two later divorced.
Cisco acquired a variety of companies to bring in products and
talent into the company. Several acquisitions, such as
Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the industry
when they occurred.
During the Internet boom in 1999, the company
acquired Cerent Corporation, a
start-up company located in Petaluma, California
, for about US$7 billion. It was the most
expensive acquisition made by Cisco to date, and only the
acquisition of
Scientific-Atlanta
has been larger. Although not every acquisition is successful,
Cisco has succeeded more frequently than its competitors in
integrating and growing the revenue of its acquisitions. Several
acquired companies have grown into $1Bn+ business units for Cisco,
including LAN switching, Enterprise
Voice over Internet Protocol
(VOIP), and
home networking.
In late March 2000, at the height of the
dot-com boom, Cisco was the most valuable
company in the world, with a
market capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a market cap of about US$108.03
billion, it is still one of the most valuable companies. CSCO was
voted stock of the decade on NASDAQ. The company's 7500 Series
router was voted 3rd in the product of the decade 1990-2000 behind
the Mosaic web browser and the Novell LAN manager.
Cisco has made inroads into many network equipment markets outside
routing, including Ethernet switching, remote access, branch office
routers,
ATM networking,
security, IP telephony, and others. In 2003, Cisco acquired
Linksys, a popular manufacturer of
computer networking hardware and positioned it as a leading
brand for the home and end user networking market
(
SOHO).
The company's first CEO was John Morgridge and was succeeded by
John Chambers.
The Corporate
Headquarters is on East Tasman Drive in San Jose,
California, between Zanker Road and Cisco Way.
The company was a 2002-03 recipient of the
Ron Brown Award.
Cisco's vision is "Changing the Way We Work, Live, Play and
Learn."Cisco's current tagline is "Welcome to the human
network."
Products and services
Partial list of hardware products
- Application Network Services
- Broadband Cable products: uBR7100 series, uBR7200 series,
uBR10012 CMTSes. A line of Cable modems, the uBR900 series and CVA122
series, were also made in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but have
since been discontinued.
- Content Networking
- DSL & Long Reach Ethernet
- Interoperability Systems
- Cisco LocalDirector
load-balancing appliance
- Optical Networking series: 15xxx Series: 15302, 15305, 15310,
15327, 15454, 15600, 1580x, 15900(wavelength router, but end for
sale)
- Cisco Network Analysis
Module (NAM) Performance Management
- Micro Webservers: 100, 200
- Routers: AGS, AGS+, MGS, IGS, CGS, SB107,
700, 800, 837, ASR1000, 1000
Series, 1600 Series, 1700, 1800 Series, 2500 Series, 2600 Series, 2800, 3600, 3700, 3800,
4000 Series, 4500, 7000 Series, 7100/7200/7300/7400 Mid Range
Customer Edge/Service Provider Edge family, 7500, 7600, ASR9000,
10000, 12000, and CRS-1
- Cisco Security
Manager
- Security & VPN products: Anomaly Detection and Mitigation
Appliances,Cisco AVS 3110 Application Velocity System, Cisco ASA
5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances, Cisco PIX 500 Series Security Appliances, Cisco
VPN 3000 Series Concentrators, Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series/7600
Series WebVPN Services Module, IPSec VPN Services Module (VPNSM) for Cisco Catalyst 6500
Switches and Cisco 7600 Series Routers
- Server Networking & Virtualization
- SPA Phone Adapters
- Storage networking
- Switches
- Catalyst series: 500 and 520
Express, 1900 Series, 2900,
2950, 2960, 3560 and 3560E, 3750 and 3750E, 4500, 6500 Nexus 7000 switch and Nexus 5000/2000
switch (from the Nuova Systems Inc. acquisition] etc..
- Metro Ethernet ME 3400 Series Access Switches
- MGX 8800 Series Multiservice Switches: MGX 8830, MGX 8850
- MDS 9000 Series Multilayer SAN Switches
- Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch
- Universal Gateways & Access Servers
- Video
- Cisco Telepresence
- Voice & IP Communications: 7900 Series IP Phones: 7936,
7905, 7906G, 7912G, 7911G, 7920, 7921G, 7925G, 7911G, 7921G, 7931G,
7936G, 7937G 7940G, 7941G, 7941G-GE, 7942G, 7945G, 7960G, 7961G,
7961G-GE, 7962G, 7965G, 7970G, 7971G-GE, 7975G and 7985G
- Wireless: Wireless Integrated Switches and Routers,Wireless IP
Telephony, Wireless LAN Access, Aironet Wireless Bridges and
Workgroup Bridges, Cisco Wireless LAN Client Adapters (PCI and PCMCIA),
Wireless LAN Controllers, Wireless Network Management, Wireless LAN
Management, Wireless Security Servers, Wireless IP Phone 7920
- Cisco UCS
Partial list of software products
Cisco Systems VPN Client
The Cisco Systems VPN (Virtual Private Network) Client is an
executable program that allows
Linux,
Mac OS X,
Solaris and
Windows based computers to
connect to a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The client makes remote
resources of another network available in a secure way as if the
user was connected directly to that "private" network. The software
is not free but is often installed on university and business
computers in accordance with a site-license.The Cisco client does
not run on any Linux 64 bit dual core systems that have SMP turned
on.
Cisco has recently released a new
VPN client
called Cisco AnyConnect VPN. The Cisco AnyConnect VPN uses
TLS and a slightly non-standard version of
DTLS as the tunneling protocol instead of the legacy
IPSec mechanism. The AnyConnect client is supported on almost all
32 and 64 bit versions of
Windows,
including Windows 7;
Linux (32-bit x86 only);
Mac OS X Intel and PPC; and Windows Mobile
Touch Screen Devices 5, 6, 6.1. Server OSes are not officially
supported, but version 2.3.0254 has been tested on Windows 2003 and
Windows 2008 Server. This new client is growing in popularity
because it supports 64 bit Windows operating systems .
Although the official Linux client has limited architecture support
and
symlink races (fixed in 2.3 and
later), there exists an
open source
client (not officially supported by Cisco) which runs on Linux,
Solaris and various BSD-based systems including Mac OS X, with
extra features such as the capability to use SSL certificates from
a
Trusted Platform Module
for authentication, and full integration with the NetworkManager
desktop network configuration under Linux, as well as the ability
to run as an unprivileged user to improve security.
VoIP services
Cisco became a major provider of
Voice
over IP to enterprises, and is now moving into the home user
market through its acquisitions of
Scientific Atlanta and
Linksys.
Scientific
Atlanta provides VoIP equipment to cable service providers such
as
Time Warner,
Cablevision,
Rogers Communications, UPC, and
others;
Linksys has partnered with companies
such as
Skype and
Yahoo
to integrate consumer VoIP services with wireless and cordless
phones.
Cisco Career Certifications
Cisco Systems also sponsors a line of
IT Professional
certifications for Cisco products. There are five levels of
certification: Entry, Associate, Professional, Expert, and
Specialist, as well as seven different paths, Routing &
Switching, Design, Network Security, Service Provider, Storage
Networking, Voice, and Wireless.
Criticisms and controversy
China
Cisco has been criticized for its involvement in
censorship in the
People's Republic of China.
According to author Ethan Gutmann, Cisco and
other telecommunications equipment providers supplied the Chinese
government
with surveillance and Internet infrastructure
equipment that is used to block Internet websites and track Chinese
on-line activities. Cisco says that it does not customize or
develop specialized or unique filtering capabilities to enable
governments or regimes to block access to information and that it
sells the same equipment in China as it sells worldwide.
Wired News had uncovered a leaked,
confidential Cisco powerpoint presentation that details the
commercial opportunities of the
Golden Shield Project of Internet
control. In her article, journalist Sarah Stirland accuses Cisco of
marketing its technology "specifically as a tool of
repression."
Shareholder class action lawsuit against Cisco
On August 18, 2006 Cisco reached a settlement in a long-standing
class action lawsuit that originated in 2001. "The original suit,
filed April 20, 2001, claimed that the company made misleading
statements, or omitted statements of material fact, that were
relied on by purchasers of Cisco stock. It also alleged that the
individual defendants sold Cisco stock while in possession of
material, non-public information. Cisco denied all allegations in
the suit." While Cisco denies all wrongdoing in the suit, it agreed
to settle with the plaintiffs. Cisco's liability insurers, its
directors, and officers paid the plaintiffs US$91.75 million to
settle the suit.
Cisco's Brazil Tax Fraud Investigation
On October
16, 2007, the Brazilian Federal
Police and Brazilian
Receita Federal (equivalent to the American IRS) under the "Persona
Operation" uncovered an alleged tax fraud scheme employed by Cisco
Systems since 2002 that exempted the company from paying over
R$1.5 billion (US$824 million) in
taxes.
Multiven's Antitrust Lawsuit Against Cisco Systems, Inc.
On December 1, 2008,
Multiven, Inc. filed
an
antitrust lawsuit against Cisco
Systems, Inc. in an effort to open up the network maintenance
services marketplace for Cisco equipment, promote competition and
ensure consumer choice and value. Multiven’s complaint alleges that
Cisco harmed Multiven and consumers by bundling and
tying bug
fixes/patches and updates for its
operating system software to its maintenance services (“
SMARTnet”) and through a series of other
illegal exclusionary and
anticompetitive acts designed to maintain
Cisco’s alleged
monopoly in the network
maintenance services market for Cisco networking equipment. The
official Multiven complaint can be read
here.
Free Software Foundation suit
On December 11, 2008, the
Free
Software Foundation filed suit against Cisco (see
FSF vs. Cisco) regarding Cisco's failure to
comply with the
GPL and
LGPL
license models and make the applicable source code publicly
available. On May 20, 2009, Cisco settled this lawsuit by complying
with FSF licensing terms and making a monetary contribution to the
FSF.
See also
Notes
Further reading
- Bunnell, D. & Brate, A. (2001). Die Cisco Story
(in German). Moderne Industrie. ISBN 3478359953.
- Bunnell, D. (2000). Making the Cisco Connection: The Story
Behind the Real Internet Superpower. Wiley. ISBN
0471357111.
- Paulson, E. (2001). Inside Cisco: The Real Story of
Sustained M&A Growth. Wiley. ISBN 0471414255.
- Slater, R. (2003). The Eye of the Storm: How John Chambers
Steered Cisco Through the Technology Collapse. HarperCollins.
ISBN 0060188871.
- Stauffer, D. (2001). Nothing but Net Business the Cisco
Way. Wiley. ISBN 1841120871.
- Waters, J. K. (2002). John Chambers and the Cisco Way:
Navigating Through Volatility. Wiley. ISBN 0471008338.
- Young, J. S. (2001). Cisco Unauthorized: Inside the
High-Stakes Race to Own the Future. Prima Lifestyles. ISBN
0761527753.
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