HP Announces $2.7bn Acquisition of 3Com
HP has announced a $2.7 billion acquisition of networking company 3Com.
Despite yesterday being Veteran's Day, HP was busier than ever. At the end of the business day, the company announced plans to purchase networking company 3Com in a multi-billion dollar deal.
The deal, already approved by the board, will see HP acquire 3Com for $7.90 per share, or $2.7 billion and bring the two that little bit closer to networking competitor, Cisco.
CNet reports that Cisco released the following statement in response to the news:
"While Cisco has a healthy respect for all of our competitors, acquisitions in our industry only validate the fact that networking is becoming the platform for all forms of communications and IT. As the leader in the networking market, Cisco is very confident in our business strategy, commitment to product innovation and ability to provide strategic business value to our customers in a highly competitive marketplace."
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

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.
i think this is great for HP as there commercial grade equipment is top notch. adding 3Com should only bring great things.
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.
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'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.
Wow! That's a lot! thanks for the info!
3com:
"We're slightly richer!" --Mr. Burns
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/Category:Networking_hardware_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.
WTF..... HP didn't buy Gateway.... Acer did! Welcome to 2007! Get out much??
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)