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1. Cisco was founded in 1984 by Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner
2. They started the foundation of Cisco's bridging and routing technologies by experimenting with the connection of disparate networks across Stanford University's campus.
3. The company's name is an homage to San Francisco, with its long-time bridge logo a play on the Golden Gate Bridge
4. Within five years of founding, Cisco built itself up from two employees and zero revenue up to 111 employees and $27 million.
5. Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) went public in 1990 at a split-adjusted price of 6 cents. As of late June 2010, the company is trading at $22.80 per share.
6. During fiscal year 2009, Cisco brought in $36.1 billion in revenue.
7. As of the end of January 2010, the company reported 68,574 employees worldwide.
8. Cisco reported in April 2010 that it has more than 60,000 channel partners worldwide.
9. AMR Research puts Cisco as number five on its World's Top 25 Supply Chains list.
10. Cisco spent over $600,000 lobbying the federal government during the first quarter of 2010 for patent reform, immigration reform, and cybersecurity and international tax legislation.
11. For over a year Cisco has been on a big push to work with partners to improve its reach within the small to medium business (SMB) market, investing $100 million in 2009 to set an SMB product strategy.
12. In 2009 it established the Small Business Partner Development Fund (PDF) to offer qualifying partners quarterly payments based on their sales of Cisco Small Business products.
13. Most recently, in April Cisco rolled out a revised SMB portfolio supported by new and revised tools, training and partner communities to aid the channel in reaching out to SMBs on behalf of the networking giant.
14. Cisco is hoping to leverage its WebEx brand to its maximum potential through new mobile collaboration applications for the Apple iPad and BlackBerry smartphones released in the first half of 2010.
15. Cisco also launched an initiative that provides new program benefits for channel partners delivering Cisco Unified Computing System and VMware vSphere in the first half of 2010.
16. The new initiative likely spawned from a relatively recent partnership between Cisco, EMC and VMware to form a Virtual Computing Environment coalition to accelerate pervasive data center virtualization and private cloud infrastructure development.
17. In addition to SMBs, Cisco is increasingly focusing on consumer efforts, dropping its Linksys branding from its consumer-oriented products and pulling these under its own Cisco brand umbrella.
18. Cisco's acquisition of Flip camera vendor Pure Digital in 2009 and its more recent closing on MOTO Development Group, a design consulting firm focused on consumer product innovation and strategy development are signs that Cisco has big plans for the consumer market.
19. Cisco's long-time innovation strategy has been to 'build, buy and partner.'
20. Since 1993, Cisco has acquired more than 140 companies.
21. Cisco spends $5.2 billion annually on R&D.
22. This year Cisco broke up a long-standing partnership with HP after HP bought competitor 3Com.
23. Cisco channel chief Keith Goodwin recently told Channel Insider that collaboration, video, virtualization and cloud services are four of the biggest market opportunities presented to its channel partners right now.
24. These four opportunities make up the foundation of what Cisco is calling its "borderless network" initiative.
25. "The borderless network is what really differentiates our view of these four market transitions. There are others who will be competing around these transitions, but our vision of how the transitions will play out has the network at the center of it all. It's a network-centric vision. And our partners are in the perfect position with us to make the vision a reality by leading these market transitions, because they've been on the network-centric journey with us and helped us to build the network as the platform over the years." -Keith Goodwin
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