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HP To Acquire 3com For $2.7 Billion
An anonymous reader writes "HP and 3Com Corporation today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase 3Com, a leading provider of networking switching, routing and security solutions, at a price of $7.90 per share in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $2.7 billion. The terms of the transaction have been approved by the HP and 3Com boards of directors."
... what happened to 3com. Some of us remember "back in the day" when 3com was one of the top brands for network cards (3c503 or 3c509 anyone?). Then their cards disappeared from the market some years ago, apparently they decided to focus on other areas. I guess it isn't a huge surprise that they would become a target for acquisition.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Somebody talked. The options market started heating up hours before the announcement.
It looks like it's going to be a good fight, as the traditional tech companies merge transformer-style into a pair of consolidated all-in-one providers. Maybe they'll battle to the death for every server room dollar.
All the while Apple sews up more and more lines in the consumer electronics market and Jobs smiles subtly. It's almost as if he knows what happens once we've consolidated everything in the datacenter.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
As a current HP bastard (who didn't post this, BTW), this pissed me off. We've endured pay cuts, benefit cuts, no raises, mass firings, hell, my local office can't even purchase paper plates & disposable spoons, and somehow there's enough money to purchase another company.
I couldn't wait to find out which company HP would destroy next.
Given what is left of HP after the hurricane Carly destroyed the place.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I can't wait for 500MB driver packages, 234454 running background processes and 7 tray icons required to configure the hardware.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
3com, we hardly knew-- ...Well, I guess we did know you. So long.
What happens when there are no companies left to merge? You get China.
The iPhone is the number one smartphone in the market by the metric that matters most to Apple: net profit.
And they sell overpriced x86 boxes to a niche market segment.
That would be the "profitable" niche - and they appear to have taken over the "profitable" corner of every game board they play on.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Started with them in Massachusetts in '93. They had some of the worst and most disorganized upper management ever. The guys doing corporate strategy must have been ADHD. They would buy a new (usually startup) company every year...some good, some bad. Kept the original management for a year, then, after all the developers and original management had gotten PO'd and left, bought another company and did the same thing. Year after year. I'm not sure what they got out of it.
I was laid off after they'd spent several years developing a gigabit enterprise switch, sold the first few, then made s surprise announcement that they were leaving the enterprise business. You can imagine how their major customers, who'd started to build new infrastructure using these switches, took that news.
They did give out great clothing, though. Still have a collection. Great co-workers, good projects, extremely poor corporate management.
i don't get it either. what can 3com possibly provide that HP doesn't already have? if carly hadn't of destroyed hp's RnD labs they could have built anything 3com have for a lot less then 2.7 billion.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Calculators are a small part of HP's business and definitely not driving this merger. Someone was saying that HP might be doing this to better position themselves in the datacenter. I guess that they see the networking products of 3Com as another way to sell HP services. In other words, look at the high margin parts of HP. They are printer refills and various support services. I don't see the 3Com merger selling more printer refills, but it does look likely to open the door to more HP services.
Adding 3com networking know-how to HP computing products may actually produce better products?
Hey it could happen!
Here's the thing... The company I work for has a few sister companies in HK and China. I work for the U.S. office.
We recently (last year) upgraded our switches in the U.S. office. Previously, we were running 3Com switches of various types and models (3300's mostly of different kinds, and some 4200's). The decision to replace them was due to the fact they were getting old and the performance wasn't really there when you start daisy chaining 10 different switches to support over 200 ports.
When looking for new switches, I looked at Cisco and HP. Our overseas IIT guy tried to get us to go the 3Com route once again, since that's what they use in the HK and China offices. Actually, they use Huawei branded switches as well as 3Com braded switches. If you don't know already, they're basically the same thing. He really tried hard to get us to go that route, but I would not budge. I did everything to show that 3Com had very little market share in the U.S. and thus very little support.
Anyway, we ended up replacing the aging 3Com equipment with HP Procurve switches (5406 and 5412). We wanted to go with Cisco switches at first, but they were our of our budget. Next to Cisco, HP seemed like the most logical choice.So far, I'm happy with the decision.
I just find it ironic that after the acquisition, that whole power struggle over which switch to use will be moot.
3ComHPaq?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Why is anybody surprised by this? Cisco announces a server product with very strong networking abilities. This is pretty much one of the few large areas of the datacenter (hardware wise) that Cisco hasn't moved into (besides disk arrays). HP sees this as a huge threat to them (bigger than IBM, who makes most revenue from services including running datacenters comprised of non-IBM equipment).
HP now realizing that they don't have the networking expertise to go after cisco directly in the networking space (one area they need to expand into to gain marketshare in the datacenter beyond servers and HDS rebranded storage, or that midrange Compaq based arrays). Well, they could go after the #2 enterprise networking company (Juniper, but they have a market cap of ~$13B), so they pick up 3com and whatever is left of it (remember they used to be partnered a while ago with Huauei, that partnership is gone tho), so they can better fight against Cisco for networking.
For these big companies it's all about expanding your presence and finding new revenue streams. Cisco can't seriously increase it's core routing/switching marketshare very easily any more than HP can increase its server marketshare.
It's not always easy to grow your company organically (from within). Look at cisco, they buy security companies, storage switching companies, WebEx. Hell, when they were a router only company, they bought an ethernet switching company (Crescendo) which later became the bread and butter business for them.
I've found HP's ProCurve Switches to be great with a lifetime warranty and free software updates compared to the Cisco equivilents which need SmartNet (maybe smart on Cisco's part) and cost 2-3 times as much.
However with alot of my clients rolling out the Cisco Voice solutions the idea usually is they standardize on all Cisco kit including the switches. I wonder if this is HP's play to get into the IP telephony market (which 3Com's website indicates they are in) to complete their offerings so a buisiness will go all-HP in a similar fashion?
Back in the Dot.Com era, there were plenty of companies out there that were all hype with little to show for it. I would continuously ask myself "Why does this crap sell?". Then the crash came, the companies that were nothing but hype were the first against the wall, they went away, the world went back to normal, and I said "Oh, now I understand!"
Now, while Apple continues to sell slightly better than mediocre products for 10X what they're worth, on hype alone, I keep asking myself "Why?" With the economy in a slide, and history apparently repeating itself once again, I'm preparing, once again, to understand...
MHO
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Bob used to answer the phone when I had a problem with the 3com card in my VAX-780. Then he was riding high for a while. I'd imagine he took out lots of cash while the company was a leader.
Bruce Perens.
They have a ton of IP, such as the patent for connecting VOIP calls to a regular PSTN, and didn't they just start flexing on their ethernet patents earlier this week? They had previously settled with Realtek for something like 70M + licensing and pretty much every other chip out there uses buffering. Obviously 70M is chump change to HP but I could see them getting 2B worth out of the rest of the 3com IP at least.
Cool! Amazing Toys.