More Cisco related news today as they have announced they will be dropping the Linksys brand name for their home networking range of products and market it over time under the Cisco brand. This is nearly 20 years after Linksys was founded and nearly 5 years after it was acquired by Cisco for $500m. Apparently the decision to change the brand name was delayed because of Linksys is such a well known brand in the US. “As you go global there is very little advantage in that”, according to Cisco chief executive John Chambers.

So, what does this really mean except that you get a cool new logo and probably some increased perceived reliability when you buy your next home networking product? Techworld’s David Cartwright seems to think “it’s bloody silly to change the name” citing cost and customer loyalty to a brand name.

I for one, am particularly interested in what this will mean for Cisco’s IP phones. While Cisco’s IP line of phones (7900 series) has been setting the standard and even raising the bar for quite some time, Linksys has had a fairly successful and impressive line of IP phones of its own (SPA series) since its acquisition of Sipura in 2005 for $68m in cash.

Be that as it may, Cisco’s IP phones sell for nearly 3 times the price of Sipura IP phones while the latter are also (mainly) sold to (small) businesses, not to home users. It looks like Cisco will be cannabilizing its own small business products in favor of Linksys’s much fairer priced VoIP product line.

Here’s a YouTube video of Chamerlain answering some questions.

[Edit] The embedded YouTube video seems to screw up with WordPress or at least with the stylesheet we’re using, so for now just click this link http://www.youtube.com/v/9muAkztwLQo. If you know how to fix this, let me know.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 12:43 CEST and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.