HP Announces $2.7bn Acquisition of 3Com

3Com, I haven't heard much about that name since the days of 56k modems. I still have a 56k 3Com modem. Don't use it anymore obviously, but I still have it.

I suppose 3Com has been much busier in the corporate sector than in the commercial sector. How many network companies does this leave? HP/3Com, Cisco/Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link? Getting pretty scarce out there.

all depends on the market you're in. Cisco def has the most wide reaching product offering but there are specialized competitors as well.

i think this is great for HP as there commercial grade equipment is top notch. adding 3Com should only bring great things.

3com are the most rock solid nic cards, I have a PCI NIC from 3com which came in a PC I bought in 96 and I still use that sucka! Not the PC, the NIC card in another one I built in 2005

They did fade away into obscurity lately though, thought the company had already folded. Kinda sad to hear HP bought them but I guess it's the way of things these days... either die or get bought out.

Now who's gonna buy HP! I wonder how much it's worth

Its current market capitalization is about $118 billion.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=HPQ&d=t

If you would like to buy it, you would need to fork out way more (many people/companies probably value it much more than the current market price).

I hope they don't churn out 3com chips under the Compaq plant. This sounds like bad news to me. I think HP has some neat laptops these days but it is kind of questionable. My coworker had to return his HP i7 destkop twice and get a refund. They have good printers though.

I've been looking at those new i7 laptops HP have, I just would rather a cleaner look on the back without the big dorky HP logo on it.

@martel80
Wow! That's a lot! thanks for the info!

3com:
"We're slightly richer!" --Mr. Burns

hellwig, there are many more, here's a few:

Extreme, Juniper, Foundry, Allied Telesis, Corecess, Arris, and many more that I don't care to remember. This is peanuts compared to the big boys. That being Cisco, Extreme, Juniper, and Foundry.

In fact, here's a list on wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categ [...] _companies

And it doesn't seem complete to me for some reason....

Dude, you can't put Netgear and D-link in the same sentence with Cisco and 3Com. 3com is a serious network equipment provider who builds their own chips and designs their own stuff for. D-link and Netgear make cheapie gear for the average idiot.

I am still confused as to what HP stands to gain from this purchase. HP already makes their own network gear and it's not bad. I guess swallowing up a competitor helps them in market share.

Oh, michaelahess... You forgot about Nortel. They also own Netgear.

Maybe HP routers and switches can stop being so shitty now.

+1 to bfstev!

HP has a history of buying troubled companies, i.e., Apollo, DEC, Gateway, EDS. This seems like a continuation of that strategy.

WTF..... HP didn't buy Gateway.... Acer did! Welcome to 2007! Get out much??

I hope HP won't adopt the poor support 3com is known for! But I suppose it's a good thing to make a good business better!
At an IT meeting yesterday we were discussing some plans, and one of my collegues said the following : "With HP you have to look at the specs to know which layer 3 switch supports dhcp relay and stuff, but that's a minor inconvencience as it's much faster than a cisco model, and costs significantly less"
So I suppose HP growing more is a good thing. All our internal network is built on HP switches (4108 mostly), and I dare say it's rarely the network that steals our time.

Their cards are rock solid, but their support rivals blizzard billing support for suckiness. Your card from '96 is probably a 3c905 in some variation right? Try using that in a windows vista, windows 2003, 2008 or windows 7 mashine! You'll find that they didn't even bother making drivers for any of those. And the 925 barely even worked when it was new, and hasn't really improved since.... I'm not so fond of 3com. Their managed switches were good once, but without staff to improve on the support you could've bought a cheap dlink instead and saved change.

That would have been US Robotics, acquired by 3Com.


Just if you use el-cheapo equipment (Cisco excluded)...


3com (one of the founders was the inventor of ethernet at Xerox PARC) did make their own HW and chips way ago, but used, e.g. relabeled Extreme Networks, for the higher-end stuff event back in the 90ies. Newer products are using just the ubiquitous broadcom/marvell/other chipsets. They may have been using lately even cheaper taiwanese - like realtek/icplus/davicom/tamarack/holtek/winbond/via/sis/whatever (Allied Telesyn/Telesis and SMC did) - hopefully not the cheapest chinese junk...


HP has a looong history of relabeling.


Or even more shitty, sold under the 3Com label... (see Cisco/Linksys, Nortel/Netgear)