Cisco is a top vendor in the networking arena and are fairly ubiquitous in enterprise environments. With the acquisition of Linksys, Cisco was able to enter into the consumer market to provide routing and switching for home networks with a proven brand.

Now it is looking to get into the SMB space with a router based on Linux to provide high quality service in non-enterprise business environments. Cisco will be phasing out the Linksys brand in favor of products branded as Cisco Small Business and Cisco Small Business Pro. Looking at this from the SMB side of the table, I can definitely see the upside both for Cisco’s business and for network admins who previously haven’t been able to justify big enterprise equipment for their SMB, but who are naturally attracted to the well-known Cisco brand.

Cisco initially built a task force to research the SMB market about a year ago and has entered the market with the AP541N wireless access point. The device should be less complex to configure and maintain than other devices because of its Linux-based configuration rather than the Cisco IOS. Read more