Cisco to lend its name for set-top boxes now

Cisco Systems Inc, the world's biggest maker of networking equipment, will go for a bigger push in consumer marketing by branding home-networking products with its own name for the first time.

The San Jose, California-based company will restamp Linksys home-networking gear and cable set-top boxes from Scientific-Atlanta with the Cisco name starting this year, Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo said yesterday in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The changes are part of Cisco's effort to expand beyond the corporations, phone companies and cable operators that use its gear to direct Internet traffic and store data.

"You will be seeing Cisco more and more in the home,'' Giancarlo said. "Depending on where you are in the world that transition may happen faster or slower depending on the brand.''

The $500 million purchase of Linksys in 2003 took Cisco into homes. Giancarlo, 49, said at an analysts' conference last month that Cisco has resisted changing the Linksys name because of consumer familiarity with it. "We need to start to consolidate around one brand,'' Giancarlo said.

Cisco spent $6.9 billion on Scientific-Atlanta last year to add cable TV boxes to its roster of routers, switches and data-security products. Scientific-Atlanta is second to Motorola Inc in STB.

It shipped 1.3 million devices in Cisco's fiscal first quarter, an 18 per cent gain a year earlier.

"They definitely need to streamline that as they try to do more at home,'' said Troy Jensen, an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. in Minneapolis, who rates the shares "outperform".

Jensen noted that only Linksys and Scientific-Atlanta have kept their names among the more than 100 acquisitions completed during the tenure of Chief Executive officer John Chambers, who changed the corporate logo last year and expanded Cisco's advertising to include network television.

Eventually, all of Cisco's home products will be tagged with the parent company's logo, Giancarlo said. For Linksys, the transition may take a couple years, he said.

To demonstrate its home-networking technology, Cisco rented a suite in the Venetian Hotel to show products such as web-based phones in a real-life setting. The company also showed a wireless print server and data storage system for the home.

The rebranding of home products is just the latest signal of the company's interest in the consumer market. In December, Cisco named Dan Scheinman, who previously handled mergers and acquisitions, to lead a new Media Solutions group.

The unit was formed to improve delivery of digital content to homes.

That followed the August acquisition of Arroyo Video Solutions to add software that lets phone and cable firms offer more on-demand services.

Cisco also bought naming rights to a new stadium for Major League Baseball's Oakland A's and plans to showcase products including features for mobile phones and wireless devices that can be used to buy merchandise.

While Cisco is uniting the consumer products under one brand, the company still must convince home-computer owners that products such as wireless routers can be easy to set up and use, said Prudential Equity Group analyst Inder Singh.

"It's about who can make it the easiest,'' said Singh, who rates the shares "overweight" and doesn't own them. "It's not a trivial exercise to make it easy for users to link routers and printers and stereo systems,'' the New York-based analyst said.

Shares of San Jose, California-based Cisco rose 16 cents to $28.63 yesterday in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. They've surged 53 per cent in the past 12 months.