Late last night UK time, I read on Twitter (via Mashable) that HP had bought 3COM. Funnily enough I’d been at HP that morning and someone had whispered that an acqusition in that space was on the cards (which we had guessed anyway). I guess I wasn’t expecting it that quickly!
I asked Steve Burnley, head of our networking business for a snapshot summary, and this is what he gave me:
– Gives HP a routing platform to compete with Cisco at both the business and service provider level
– Security – Tippingpoint is a strong (but very under-developed in Europe) product range – very big in the US
– 3Com switch will be discontinued as quickly as they possibly can.
– They’re still missing an FCoE platform, but Brocade could yet fit that bill
I’m pleased to say Steve didn’t spot that one coming, and I’m hoping his shares in another networking vendor aren’t hit too hard! We’ll see if his predictions come true. I’ll look forward to a briefing on Tippingpoint.
This is only going to accelerate the battle between HP and Cisco, which I am watching with interest from fairly close to the sidelines….
Official release here:
Sam Routledge's Blog 
November 12, 2009 at 9:30 am |
Brief update to Sam’s post:
I had missed out a key piece of the puzzle (OK, hands up, I forgot), which is the H3C business which 3Com aquired from Huwai. This does have a core Datacentre/FCoE offering which is pitched squarely at the Nexus 7000 range. On that basis, HP are conceivably closer to a unified end to end Datacentre architecture than Cisco are right now, given their dominance in the server market and existing strengths in Storage.
BTW, if anyone’s concerned I did pretty well out of my punt on another networking vendor – although not as well as I’d hoped!
November 12, 2009 at 9:50 am |
Thanks for the clarification Steve. I wonder if this will increase speculation around Cisco buying a storage vendor?