Sandy Lerner (born 1955) is an American businesswoman and philanthropist. She co-founded Cisco Systems and used the money from its sale to pursue interests in animal welfare and women's writing. One of her main projects, Chawton House, is in England, but most of her work remains in the United States.
Sandy currently resides in Virginia, where she owns Ayrshire Farm. Lerner dedicates her time to Chawton House Library and the animal welfare community worldwide.
Leonard X. Bosack (born 1952) is a co-founder of Cisco Systems, an American-based multinational corporation that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking and communications technology, and services. His net worth is approximately $200 million. He was awarded the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2009 for co-founding Cisco Systems and pioneering and advancing the commercialization of routing technology and the profound changes this technology enabled in the computer industry.
He is largely responsible for pioneering the widespread commercialization of local area network (LAN) technology to connect geographically disparate computers over a multiprotocol router system, which was an unheard-of technology at the time. In 1990, Cisco's management fired Cisco co-founder Sandy Lerner and Bosack resigned. As of 2010, Bosack was the CEO of XKL LLC, a privately funded engineering company which explores and develops optical networks for data communications.
Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products. Cisco specializes in specific tech markets, such as the Internet of things (IoT), domain security, videoconferencing, and energy management with products including Webex, OpenDNS, Jabber, Duo Security, Silicon One, and Jasper.
Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, two Stanford University computer scientists. They pioneered the concept of a local area network (LAN) being used to connect distant computers over a multiprotocol router system. The company went public in 1990 and, by the end of the dot-com bubble in 2000, had a market capitalization of $500 billion, surpassing Microsoft as the world's most valuable company.