Leonard Bosack

Pioneer of commercialization of routing technology and co-founder of Cisco Systems, Bosack received the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2009 for pioneering and advancing the commercialization of routing technology and the profound changes this technology enabled in the computer industry. Along with his wife Sandy Lerner, Bosack co-founded Cisco Systems, an American-based multinational corporation that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking and communications technology and services. Bosack has been 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 unheard-of technology at the time. In 1990, Cisco's management fired his wife Sandy Lerner, and he resigned. He subsequently served as CEO of XKL LLC, a privately funded engineering company that explored and developed optical networks for data communications.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1952, Bosack graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and joined DEC as a hardware engineer. In 1979 he was accepted into Stanford University and began to study computer science. During his time at Stanford, he has been credited with becoming a support engineer for a 1981 project to connect all of Stanford's mainframes, minis, LISP machines, and Altos. His contribution was to work on the network router that allowed the computer network under his management to share data from the Computer Science Lab with the Business School's network.

In 1984, Bosack co-founded Cisco with the aim of commercializing the Advanced Gateway Server, a revised version of the Stanford router built by William Yeager and Andy Bechtolsheim. He and Lerner designed and built routers in their house and experimented using Stanford's network. Initially, he and Lerner went to Stanford with a proposition to start building and selling the routers, but the school refused. It was then that they founded their own company and named it "Cisco," taken from the name of the city to the north.

Cisco's product was developed in their garage and was sold beginning in 1986 by word of mouth. In their first month alone, Cisco landed contracts worth more than $200,000. The company produced revolutionary technology such as the first multiport router-specific line cards and sophisticated routing protocols, giving them domination over the marketplace. Cisco went public in 1990, the same year that Bosack resigned. He and his wife walked away from Cisco with $170 million after being forced out by the professional managers the firm's venture capitalists brought in. In 1996, Cisco's revenues amounted to $5.4 billion, making it one of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories. In 1998, the company was valued at over $6 billion and controlled over three quarters of the router business.

Bosack also held significant technical leadership roles at AT&T Bell Labs and Digital Equipment Corporation. After earning his Master's Degree in computer science from Stanford University, he served as Director of Computer Facilities for the university's Department of Computer Science. He has been a key contributor to the emerging network technology driven by the U.S. Department of Defense (ARPAnet), which was the beginning of today's Internet.

His most recent technological advancements have included his creation of new in-line fiber optic amplification systems capable of achieving unprecedented data transmission latency speeds of 6.071 milliseconds (fiber plus equipment latency) over 1,231 kilometers of fiber, roughly the distance between Chicago and New York City. Bosack has been inspired by his belief that by leveraging the inherent, but often untapped, physics of fiber optic components, data transmission speeds can be increased with devices that use less power, less space, and require less cooling.