Linksys Gears Up For European Push

Tsao said during a parking-lot celebration of the Irvine-based home networking company's 15th anniversary that the company's main problem at the moment was to be able to scale to meet interest in the growing home-networking market and from Cisco's sales channel.

He said integration with Cisco was proceeding well. "Cisco is very serious about our business model," he said. "And they don't intend to change much."

Cisco acquired Linksys in March for $500 million in stock, saying from the start that it intended to operate Linksys as an independent division and maintain the Linksys brand name.

He said no decisions as yet had been made in terms of what Cisco technology might show up in Linksys products, which are manufactured in Asia. He said there were several areas where that might be possible, helping turn Linksys into the "Sony" of home networking, such as Cisco's VPN client.

As for the potential that Linksys might cannibalize some of Cisco's product line, Tsao said: "This is absolutely the biggest concern they have. I will work my best to make sure that doesn't happen."