Cisco to kill off Linksys brand

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 29 July 2007 13:36

Opinion and Analysis

Cisco CEO John Chambers has announced plans to kill off the Linksys brand, but it is clear from his comments that the move means much more than selling what were Linksys products into the home with a different label on them.

Chambers made the announcement during a roundtable discussion with European journalists, extracts of which have been posted on YouTube. He said "[Linksys] will come overtime into a Cisco brand. The reason we kept Linksys' brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there's very little advantage in that."

However, four years after the acquisition, the Linksys brand is starting to become established in overseas markets thanks to Cisco's aggressive marketing and a swag of new products, although these have been branded "Linksys by Cisco".

The acquisition of Linksys marked Cisco's entry into the Consumer market, and was followed by the acquisition of Scientific Atlanta, when Cisco said  it hoped to exploit synergies with the  experience and expertise of Linksys in the consumer market.

Chambers also told the roundtable that he did not see the consumer market as being separate from Cisco's core market (enterprise and telcos) and that he would never have entered the consumer market if he saw it as being a standalone market.

"We said in 1999 that the future would be the network of networks and that people would not view their home network different than their service provider's network, different than their enterprise network or than their interface to commercial networks. So we have to live in all those markets. All the consumer or the business leader will care about is 'give me access wherever I am on the device I am most comfortable with' and what the device is capable of doing and 'let the network be smart enough to figure out its capabilities and what I am authorised to access.' That looks like it is going to occur."