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Cisco's Linksys brand may disappear sooner than expected, according to a top executive for small business at the company, although he wouldn't say how quickly.
The company sells networking gear for SMBs under both the Cisco and Linksys brands, which has created some confusion, vice president of SMB Solutions Marketing Rick Moran acknowledged in an interview on Monday. Linksys was a successful vendor of home and SMB networking gear that Cisco acquired in 2003. There are routers, wireless LANs and other products under both brands that are aimed at small enterprises.
Chairman and CEO John Chambers said last year at an event in Europe, captured in a YouTube video, that Linksys would disappear under the Cisco brand over time. Linksys followed up by saying its brand wasn't going anywhere in the near term.
Cisco had already moved to allow its SMB channel partners to sell both Cisco and Linksys products, starting about a year ago, but in the process found out most of them didn't want to carry both, Moran said. Those that sold Cisco gear weren't interested in selling the simpler Linksys products because they wanted to sell their customers system integration services, and Linksys resellers were more geared toward selling individual products, he said.
Now Cisco is working to clear up the confusion by modifying its SMB Web site and having Cisco and Linksys product teams work more closely together, Moran said. Their product road maps are now aligned, he said. But there will still be an evolution toward one brand.
"It will be shorter than you think," Moran said. The evolution is likely to happen first outside the U.S., where Linksys products are sold but Cisco hasn't spent any money building up that brand, he added.
The Linksys brand ultimately will be replaced by a product category, similar to the Catalyst series of switches or WebEx conferencing services, which Cisco acquired last year, he said. The company has worked out how to do so without "orphaning" the Linksys name, according to Moran. Cisco won't leave any of the channels that now carry its SMB products: retail, distributors, small value-added resellers and service providers. The key difference will remain support.
"We need a definition to say there's a difference in the support model that goes behind them," Moran said. Cisco products are known for extensive support, while Linksys gear is designed for ease of use out of the box.

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Comments (17)
Yeh maybe they can buy a boxBy Anon on June 26, 2008, 7:36 amYeh maybe they can buy a box full of dog feces with an HP logo on the front.
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Ha HA By Anonymous on April 25, 2008, 8:33 amYeah the Geat CISCO right place right time that is ciso. But they just charge to much and there service stinks.. I mean some products have like 10-15 versions...
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WAKE UP PEOPLE!By Anonymous on April 18, 2008, 2:53 pmLinkSys Switches have been running a CISCO OS since about 2002, and believe me, It didn’t make it any better, I think it made the product more confusing (and me...
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Shocked and Awwed!By Anonymous on April 18, 2008, 2:43 pmWell, if you didn’t see this coming then you’re already blind. The day that CISCO decided to acquire LinkSys I knew this was going to happen. LinkSys did have...
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Cisco's PlanBy dbranch on April 18, 2008, 10:35 amAs I understand it, Cisco simply wants to be the company that provides networking solutions from the top to the bottom. They didn't want to put Linksys "out of...
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