Cisco
Cisco Systems, Inc is a multinational corporation with 63,000 employees and annual revenue of US$35 billion (2007) and is the world's second-largest company. Headquartered in San Jose, California, it designs and sells networking and communications technology and services under five brands, namely Cisco, Linksys, WebEx, IronPort, and Scientific Atlanta. The company builds equipment for the "backbone" of the internet, routers and other gear needed to operate the world-wide web and corporate computer networks.
Cisco produces a wide range of networking hardware including:-
- Routers
- Broadband Cable products
- Optical Networking series
- Storage networking
- Voice & IP Communications
- Video
- Universal Gateways & Access Servers
It sells its products primarily to large enterprises and telecommunications service providers, but it also markets products designed for small businesses and consumers through its Linksys division.
Cisco's primary product from the beginning was the internetworking router, a hardware device incorporating software that automatically selects the most effective route for data to flow between networks. Cisco's routers pioneered support for multiple protocols or data transmission standards, and could therefore link together different kinds of networks, those having different architectures and those built on different hardware, such as IBM-compatible personal computers