Cisco Systems, Inc. (
NASDAQ&_160;
CSCO,
SEHK 4333) is a
multinational corporation with more than 66,000 employees and annual revenue of
US$39 billion as of 2008. 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.[2]
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 deffered revenue for multi-year SMARTnet service contracts.[3] Network maintenance services now accounts for 20% of Cisco's annual revenue - an all-time high.
While Cisco was not the first company to develop and sell a router,[4] it was one of the first to sell commercially successful routers supporting multiple network protocols.[5] 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.
