Microsoft's latest ploy to rule the living room

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 06 September 2007 13:27

Opinion and Analysis

Cisco and Microsoft made much of their cooperation last month with a high profile chit chat between CEOs Steve Ballmer and John Chambers, and these devices could well be one of the fruits of that co-operation, but the 'digital home' is a market in which the two giants will be competing vigorously.

At a recent media roundtable in Europe Chambers said he would not have got into the consumer market (by buying Linksys and, later Scientific Atlanta) "if I did not see the virtualisation of processors, of storage and even applications over time into the home and you [the user] not caring where it is. We think that will happen."

One of Cisco's lesser known investments in recent times clearly has the potential to put Cisco head to head against these latest moves from Microsoft. In April this year Cisco was one of the contributors to $US7 million in venture capital funding secured by Melbourne-based Avega Systems, a company that develops technology for integrating multiple systems in the digital home.

Avega's Aios technology combines a range of networking technologies - ethernet, WiFi, broadband over powerline - to enable whole-home, multi-zone distribution of content from a range of sources including Internet radio, media centre PCs, portable media players, cellphones, legacy audiovisual equipment, networked storage and set top boxes. The technology is provided to manufacturers of these products on an OEM basis.

By Cisco's standards its investment is Microscopic, but it may not stay that way.