Michael Pocock is engaged in a balancing act as the top guy at Irvine’s Cisco-Linksys LLC, the consumer business of networking kingpin Cisco Systems Inc.
Pocock took the reins two years ago from Linksys founders Victor and Janie Tsao, who had grown their business selling routers, adapters, switches and other home networking devices from their garage in Irvine.
As senior vice president and general manager, Pocock is charged with keeping that homegrown feel and simultaneously fitting into the big, global company culture of Cisco.
So far it’s working, as Linksys has grown closer to Cisco since its $500 million acquisition five years ago but has kept some independence.
“Cisco has acquired over 100 companies and most of them have been integrated into various groups within six to 12 months,” Pocock said. “But there was a conscious decision made by Cisco’s board to keep Linksys separate. It’s part of our DNA.”
After the sale, the Tsaos stayed on for three years to oversee the transition.
Pocock was handpicked by Cisco from his post as chief executive of Polaroid Corp., part of Minnetonka, Minn.-based Petters Group Worldwide LLC, to run the company from its University Research Park headquarters near the University of California, Irvine.
He walks a fine line of encouraging the company to cozy up to parent Cisco while still holding tight to its Linksys identity.
“We work a lot closer with Cisco than we ever have before,” Pocock said. “In the past the need to collaborate and leverage the assets of the corporation were minimized. Linksys in a lot of ways was an island.”
The company is set to include Cisco’s name more prominently on its products sold in stores and distributed to small and midsize businesses through resellers.
As it stands, Linksys is identified as “a division of Cisco” on boxes.
It’s set to be labeled “Linksys by Cisco”,with Cisco getting the same size lettering,in coming years.
Still, Cisco and Linksys will maintain “an arms-length relationship,” Pocock said.
“Inside the U.S., Linksys has a very strong brand, so we are not going to do anything crazy there,” he said.
Pocock has an overarching task: to turn Linksys into a global company.
At the time the Tsaos sold the company, it saw about 95% of sales from the U.S.
Global Sales
Cisco’s goal for Linksys is to have half of its sales come from abroad by 2010.
It’s on its way,Linksys now has roughly 35% of its sales from outside the U.S.
Cisco doesn’t break out sales for Linksys.
The Business Journal estimates that it saw about $1 billion in revenue last year.
“To be global, it meant that we had to stop making decisions in Irvine,” Pocock said. “Because of the cultural differences, language differences and timing differences, it really wasn’t practical for us to try to run the world out of Irvine.”
Pocock has spurred a big cultural shift at the company. He calls himself a “change agent.”
“My management style was quite a bit different from the prior management here,” he said. “As most startups go, because cash flow is so important, you tend to have more of an autocratic, command-and-control type management.”
The Tsaos had split the business up between the two of them. Victor Tsao handled all of the operations and Janie Tsao headed sales and marketing.
It was a system that worked for years.
“It was very successful,” Pocock said. “But to be able to scale this business and to become a global company, you really need more of an empowerment and accountability model. It required a transformation of the culture at Linksys.”
Change at Linksys was sometimes a “painful process,” Pocock said.
One of his first moves was to take the top 70 managers and in separate meetings over four months develop a long-term plan for the company.
Such a plan “didn’t exist before,” he said. “There were always quarterly and yearly goals, but nobody really looked at where the industry was going or the competitive landscape.”
Linksys’ major rivals include Fountain Valley’s D-Link Systems Inc. and Santa Clara-based NetGear Inc.
It is increasingly butting heads with the likes of Samsung Corp., Apple Inc. and Sony Corp. as it’s moved up to more high-end home networking gear, according to Pocock.
Modern Look
In recent years the company remade its routers to look more modern,redesigning the cable-laden, light-blinking box into a sleek black device that looks more like modern art than technology.
“Your typical router is hidden under a desk or in a cabinet,” Pocock said. “You certainly wouldn’t have it out on your coffee table. But these devices will be aesthetically more pleasing and they will be designed to look like what other electronics products look like in your home so that they kind of disappear.”
Linksys did a bit more redesigning last month when it took over a building nearby that housed online video game maker Blizzard Entertainment Inc. until last year.
Word is Linksys had to “de-Blizzard” the place, taking out a lot of odd decor put in place by the company’s eclectic staff of game developers, animators and software engineers.
The move brings Linksys local presence to three buildings in Irvine and about 465 workers here.
