Cisco Systems

The problem was that the campus ran several networks that could not talk to each other, each with its own protocol. The multiprotocol router - one box that spoke TCP/IP, AppleTalk, IPX, DECnet and the rest simultaneously - was the answer, and it arrived exactly as organisations everywhere discovered they had the same mess.

That timing is most of the explanation for what followed. Cisco did not have to persuade anyone that internetworking mattered; it had to be the company with a shipping product when they worked it out for themselves. IOS became the language enterprise networking was described in, to the point that competitors shipped IOS-like command lines because that was what operators already knew.

The acquisition machine was the other half. Cisco bought more than two hundred companies, and the strategy was explicit: buy the category rather than build it, integrate the technology into the portfolio, and use the channel to sell it. Crescendo in 1993 became Catalyst. Grand Junction became Fast Ethernet. IronPort, which appears on this timeline in its own right, became the email security line in 2007. Splunk, also here, became the observability and security data business in 2024 at around $28B - the largest purchase in company history.

The certification programme deserves its own mention, because it changed how the industry hires. CCNA, CCNP and CCIE created a vendor-defined competency ladder that employers treated as a proxy for skill, and every vendor on this site with a certification track is working from a template Cisco established.

It has been challenged in every segment it occupies and has lost ground in several, but the shape of enterprise networking - the vocabulary, the certification model, the assumption that one vendor can supply the whole stack - is substantially Cisco's design.