Linksys Still Alive and Kicking

Cisco Systems is still undecided about its corporate strategy concerning the consumer and small business division named Linksys. First, Cisco chairman and chief executive officer, John Chambers said that his company may drop the Linksys brand altogether at a discussion with the European press, according to the Uberpulse blog cited by the Web based news site InfoWorld.

Linksys was already a well known and established brand in its own right in the U.S. when Cisco Systems acquired it in 2003 because of its strong market position as a home and small business networking solutions vendor. "It will all come, over time, into a Cisco brand," Chambers said on a YouTube video embedded in the blog and cited by InfoWorld. "The reason we kept [the] Linksys brand [was] because it was better known in the U.S. than even Cisco was, for the consumer. As you go globally, there's very little advantage in that." But it seems that Linksys disagrees with its parent company as a spokesperson said that "over time" means not in the near future anyway and more probably means a long time.

"Linksys consumer and SMB products will continue to be marketed under the Linksys brand and co-exist in the market with Cisco-branded connected home products over the near term," Linksys said in a prepared statement on Friday. "We will continue to examine our branding strategy going forward (as we have done to date) and make changes if and when these changes add value to our customers' decision-making processes and our channel partners."

All the talks about the termination of the Linksys brand comes after the April Cisco move that introduced Cisco products to traditional Linksys resellers and the introduction of the Smart Business Communication System that is a unified communication platform aimed at small businesses and enterprises. Cisco also said that their own networking gear and platforms are more complex than Linksys ones and some clients prefer the Linksys brand because of budget constraints and because Cisco products are not sold through retail store and general hardware channels. The Cisco Systems CEO stated that over the years the networking gear and platforms of both Linksys and Cisco will converge into a single product package so customers will not need to worry about compatibility issues and the like.