A senior executive of Cisco owned Linksys has said that the Company is working towards developing a proprietary “Connected Home” and Connected Office” structure which they are considering licensing to other CE Companies in the same way that Matsushita Electric did with their VHS technology in the 1970’s.
Michael Pocock the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Linksys said during an exclusive interview with SmartHouse News that Linksys through a series of acquisitions has been able to put together a team of R&D specialists who are today developing hardware and software capabilities that will give consumers and small medium business access to a seamless CE experience that is way beyond what is available today. Key to this experience is network and content he says.
Some of this new technology is set to be revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2007.
Pocock who joined Cisco from Polaroid and prior to that Compaq claims that Linksys want to be “agnostic” in developing their next CE platform which could be licensed to major CE brands for inclusion in anything from a TV screen to a specialised media centre.
During the past 18 months Cisco has acquired several Companies in the CE market including video start up Arroyo Video Solutions which they got for $92 million. Late last year they acquired Danish Company KISS who design and manufacture media centres and DVD players for $62 million. A middleware Company the KISS Brand according to Pocock is set to be killed off as Linksys move to cementing the Linksys brand globally.
Cisco plans to integrate the Arroyo technology into its IP-NGN (Next Generation Network) architecture to help its service provider customers distribute on-demand video content across various devices, including televisions, PCs and mobile handsets.
The move complements Cisco’s service provider business and its move into the home market, which was bolstered by its February acquisition of set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta.
“We are now building the Linksys brand globally. We have to be more of a global brand delivering local solutions on a local platform for consumers who are telling vendors what they want. We have to listen to their needs” says Pocock. “Consumers are in control today so there has to be a radical change in the attitude of vendors. Consumers are now driving the market and to be competitive one has to deliver what they want as there is a lot more competition than ever before”.
“Currently there is no CE standard. Intel has tried with Viiv but there are a lot of forces working against them. We believe that there is an opportunity to develop a proprietary solution that becomes an open standard that can be licensed to other CE vendors. Matsushita Electric did it with their VHS technology in the 1070’s when they went up against the Sony Beta technology. While the Sony technology was superior it was the licensing of the VHS platform that saw the technology take off”.
“Networking is the key to the future and at Cisco we are building around the Linksys brand a lot of capabilities. We are investing in Asia and Australia. We are forming new JV’s” he said.
When asked why Cisco had acquired the Danish Company KISS and whether they were set to continue with the brand Pocock said “We bought KISS because they are a very good middleware Company. We will not continue with the KISS brand but we are using the KISS team to work with other Cisco teams to develop embedded gateway technology for set top boxes as well as other technology for the home and the SMB market” he said.
