Cisco has built a formidable business in data plumbing since its creation in 1984. This success with enterprises and the back-end provision of the Internet made Cisco a wealthy company but one with a problem: Where to go when you’ve wired up the whole world?

A major strategy that the firm started about a decade ago was to move closer to consumers (or SMBs) through the acquisition of firms that made consumer premises equipment (Linksys, Scientific Atlanta), consumer devices (Pure Digital Technologies – creators of the Flip camera, KiSS Technology), or services (Pure Networks, makers of Network Magic). Naturally, these firms only represented a fraction of Cisco’s 150+ acquisitions over the years, but they stuck out as firms that weren’t in Cisco’s traditional market areas.

Cisco is also renowned for its ability to embrace, merge, and get good results from firms that it has acquired – so what went wrong with those consumer acquisitions? Why hasn’t the firm built a more recognizable name on the high street, and what does this teach us about today’s consumer technology space. Cisco has:

• No brand strategy. Cisco was never going to spend Apple-level money to build a consumer brand. Linksys has a good name in routers but only among those who understand/care about such things. And while most Cisco acquisitions could be brought in under the gold-plated Cisco business brand, this also was pretty unfamiliar to consumers. Back when Linksys was acquired, this wasn’t as big a deal as it is today, when branding from Apple, Samsung, and even Microsoft is so dominant.
• Razor-thin margins. For a firm that made an excellent business of higher-margin enterprise and infrastructure hardware – with additional revenue from training certification and maintenance contracts – making do with the 5% or less margin that manufacturers of successful consumer technologies get was never going to be easy.
• Increased competition from China. The past 10 years have also seen the emergence of stronger global competitors from China: Huawei and ZTE are the best known. While Cisco may be able to fend off much of the challenge in the enterprise space by playing the quality card or lobbying governments for bans on “security” grounds, stopping cheap home routers and mobile dongles (largely sourced by telcos and cablecos for rebadging and distribution to consumers) is far harder. A firm like ASUSTeK is even competing at the high-end with its excellent “Dark Knight” router.
• Made bets that misjudged the market. Finally, Cisco made a number of strategic bets that simply didn’t pay off. Two spring to mind: 1) building Linksys music streamers and home servers to compete with the likes of Sonos – both markets have proven to be tiny; and 2) getting into dedicated point-and-click imaging devices just as mobile phones became equally competent and user-friendly for shooting YouTube clips.

So what’s next? It seems likely that if the rumors of a Linksys sale do turn out to be true, one of the other consumer networking brands like Belkin, D-Link, or NETGEAR could pick it up. But, ironically, a firm like Huawei or ZTE would benefit the most from the (limited) brand recognition that Linksys offers in the marketplace. The disposal will mean that Cisco retrenches to its heartland of enterprise networking, licking its wounds after an interesting (from an analyst perspective) decade of consumer experimentation.

For other corporate-targeted entities with ambitious consumer goals (we’re looking at you Microsoft!) this is a cautionary tale – being a great technology company that excels at integrating acquisitions isn’t enough to catch a break in the consumer technology world today.