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This year, will it be Linksys, or Cisco, who shows up at CeBIT?

blog - Normally at this time of year, London turns into a sort of "front door for Germany" as American technologists start arriving in Europe to set up their booths in Hannover - for the CeBIT show. But this year, no Mike Wagner - marketing boss of Linksys in the US.

A little private digging elicited this: "Oh, no; it's going to be a much more Cisco-based Linksys, and much more European. You do know that Cisco's former channel manager, Tunji Akintokun is running the Linksys show, based in the UK?" No, news to me, I'll admit...

Details of what Linksys will produce in Hannover are hard to establish, and the date when we'll get to find out exactly what products are in those packing crates is 15th March. But some things have leaked out.

First, senior Cisco executives are making no bones about it: Linksys is going to be much more "a part of Cisco" from here on, using Cisco R&D and products. And second, watch out for the "hidden" Linksys - the small business Linksys, selling its Trojan Horse at http://www.linksysone.com - system management.

On the consumer/home side, I'm not tempted to be excited. I'm betting that Linksys will probably do what it has done every year, without significantly changing people's buying habits - it will (I'm told) try to focus on multimedia streaming.

Exactly what makes this year different from all the others, is probably the scale of the operation. Previous years, we've had Ethernet music centres. I still don't know anybody who bought one, and I certainly haven't managed to get one to test.

This year, I'm betting on high definition video. Unless they've made a big breakthrough in the user interface, however, can it make any of us really keen on setting up a home media centre? I'm sceptical.

But on the small office side, I think Linksys rivals should be a bit anxious. I'm hearing about products aimed not just at the traditional Linksys small company (from two to 50 staff) but right up to the 200-headcount corporation. And there are hints that network attached storage may be part of the new product range - perhaps even RAID high-capacity systems?

And the Linksys One products are definitely sneaky. Briefly, it's what Cisco would probably call a management services platform that allows service providers to develop and provide services to SMEs. The LinksysOne devices are the edge devices. What these devices can do, is be managed centrally via this large box, by the edge provider.

"One of the added benefits of Linksys One is that you will get access to Internet-delivered applications that increase competitiveness," says the blurb. "Your ISP hosts the applications on their servers..." and it specifically mentions unified messaging, Web conferencing and network management services.

Look for a PDF Acrobat brochure at the bottom of this page