Cisco is a US technology company that is best known for its networking products.
Headquartered in California, Cisco develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, telecoms equipment and other IT services and products.
The company was founded in 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner. The pair pioneered the concept of the Local Area Network (LAN) being used to connect computers over large distances using a multiprotocol router system.
This put Cisco in a good position to capitalise on the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, with the company outlasting many competitors who failed during the dot-com bubble.