News that Cisco intended to divest its Linksys home-networking business unit broke last December, but Belkin’s decision—announced last Thursday—to acquire that division came as a surprise. Belkin’s intentions are even more interesting: The company isn’t just buying a prestige brand to slap on its existing home-networking product line; it plans to market networking products under both brands.

When I asked Belkin’s Chief Technology Officer Brian Van Harlingen how that might benefit consumers, he replied that Belkin’s employees “strive to understand user needs, and deliver a good user experience. The philosophy at Linksys isn’t fundamentally different, but each company has different strengths. Linksys did [the cloud-based router administration software] Smart Wi-Fi, and we’ve done great work in terms of quality of service [QoS describes the ability to assign priorities to different data flows, so that gaming and video traffic are given priority over downloads]. Where do those things come together? We think the ultimate outcome of putting the two companies together will be ‘one plus one equals three.’”

According to Van Harlingen, Belkin “sees Linksys as a premier brand. They brought wireless networking into the home. But our intention is to maintain both brands in networking; each has a unique appeal to consumers, and we think we can create differentiation for the two product lines.”

Van Harlingen says Belkin also sees an opportunity to grab some market share in the small to medium-size business market, a market that Linksys had largely drifted away from while under Cisco’s control. “We’re still working on long-terms plans and product roadmaps, but Linksys goes back a ways and [the brand] had some real credibility in the SMB space. We see some opportunity there.”

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