HP Acquiring 3Com

Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to buy 3Com for $2.7 billion. Wow, that is quite a chunk of change.

"By combining HP ProCurve offerings with 3Com's extensive set of solutions, we will enable customers to build a next-generation network infrastructure that supports customer needs from the edge of the network to the heart of the data center," Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of HP's Enterprise Servers and Networking business said in a statement.

send in the clouds!

At least it didn't go to the Chinese.

I didn't even know 3com was still relevant in this day and age.

deff - I didn't even know 3com was still relevant in this day and age.

Yeah, thats what I thought at least for home and SMB. I know they are still pretty well used in enterprise level stuff. Sounds like they are big over in China now.

3Com, haven't heard that name in awhile. I see this as a smart move by HP if they have some usable resources or technologies.

Wow. 3com hasn't be relevant for nearly a decade. What a waste of money.

About all i even seen on hp's was 3com stuff. So honestly it was a smart move since that was what they was using anyway. Why not cut out the middle man and save a little cash.

That's assuming there is any savings. Buying from a middle man isn't a bad choice. The middle man can often be cheaper then supplying the part yourself. There are also less risk when dealing with the middle man. The middle man sells to many manufactures, will other manufactures going to continue buying from 3Com under HP?

That was what i was wondering also. If they still continue to sell to 3Com buyers after buying them out then it will be a good deal.

Originally Posted by moro

I know they are still pretty well used in enterprise level stuff.

Really? If by 'well used' you mean banned, maybe.

That kind of money would have been far better spent at NASA.

Actually I owned 3Com stock for about a year knowing they were a prime acquisition target. I guess I should have held them longer but they got so cheap I got spooked and couldn't wait.

Actually 3Com is big in China and Europe although Cisco is still bigger. Cisco and Juniper have pretty much locked them out of the US market for years. Early last year the government blocked an acquisition by a Chinese company.

See the story at..
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/bu.../21invest.html

Originally Posted by digitalfreak

Wow. 3com hasn't be relevant for nearly a decade. What a waste of money.

How are they not relevant, i know they were big players with awsome NIC's about 6-7 years ago...

Originally Posted by SpaceHonkey

Really? If by 'well used' you mean banned, maybe.

That kind of money would have been far better spent at NASA.

how were they banned from enterprise?

3Com is actually still worth $2.7 billion?

I work in europe and am also working on a global network transition (can't name any names)... but we have sites containing purely 3Com switches with 1 or 2 cisco routers. We also have plenty of HP re-branded 3Com switches on these sites. South america and asia specifically. Less so Africa and europe.

America is all cisco/Juniper and australia as well.

Originally Posted by Vermillion

3Com is actually still worth $2.7 billion?

Internally, the story is that 3Com must have really crappy employee benefits, which HP will 'extend' to the rest of the HP employee base to be 'fair'. We figure that savings cuts the actual acquisition cost to something reasonable, and maybe even profitable in and of itself.

I remember when US Robotics used to be a huge name in modem technology in the dial-up days before they went under during the rise of broadband, then 3Com bailed them out.

Ever since, 3Com pretty much fell off the map.

I wonder what this would mean to laptops. Every HP laptops I buy for my company has Lucent or Agere modems built into it. Maybe this will mean we'll start seeing 3Com modems instead.

3Com an HP Company.

Originally Posted by MrGuvernment

How are they not relevant, i know they were big players with awsome NIC's about 6-7 years ago...




how were they banned from enterprise?

Actually until Intel got in the network game, 3COM was the defacto standard for network cards. The last examples I worked a few years back, however..not so much.

I can understand how someone in the US could feel they weren't relevant as they pretty much ceded the US market to Cisco. The only network products I saw in the US were mostly consumer grade/workgroup stuff for the past 5 years. They've kept themselves alive in places other than the US.

Patents maybe?