Hewlett-Packard: 8 Weapons 3Com Brings to the HP-Cisco Brawl

HP’s massive $2.7 billion pick-up of 3Com will certainly turn the heat up on the company’s growing rivalry with Cisco. Channel Insider takes a look at which new capabilities added by 3Com will best help HP go toe-to-toe with Cisco.

3Com Open Network Program

HP has made it clear that the biggest differentiator it has developed in its battle against the Cisco networking juggernaut is a product base built on an open architecture. 3Com complements this strategy with its 3Com Open Network Program, through which the company has worked to develop relationships with ISVs, service providers, system integrators, consultants and customers to improve interoperability and open development in the networking environment.

Data Center Core Switch S12500

The coup de grace of the 3Com acquisition will be the added capability of core and aggregation switching, a needed complement to flesh out HP’s offering beyond the edge into the core. At the heart of this is the young H3C switch portfolio, including the flagship H3C S1250, doubles the performance of Cisco’s Nexus 7000 and eats up half the power of this rival.

Flex Chassis SwitchS5800

Similarly, HP is paying big bucks for the top-of-rack switching capabilities offered by 3Com, as evidenced by the H3C S5800, a flex-chassis switch that can be used as a modular chassis as well as a fixed-form-factor stackable switch.

MSR Family

Though ProCurve has helped HP beat up on Cisco at the edge within the SMB, HP’s still weak when it comes to enterprise edge routing. 3Com helps remedy the situation with the MSR family of routers, many of which will help HP take on Cisco’s ISR series.

Intelligent Management Center

HP’s existing Business Technology Optimization (BTO) suite will gain added firepower with the addition of Intelligent Management Center. An enterprise-class management system that scale to handle a high-density infrastructure, IMC is built on service-oriented architecture and can help enterprise customers consolidate network management within the largest of environments.

TippingPoint

While HP certainly bolstered its security practice with the 2007 acquisition of SPI Dynamics, it was still lacking strength in the area of network security. A venerable player in the IPS/IDS field, TippingPoint offers HP options to not only sell stand alone intrusion detection, but also build it into next generation networking equipment, a strategy that 3Com was already spinning up with H3C.

3Com VoIP

While there’s certainly some overlap with HP’s Halo, 3Com’s VoIP portfolio offers a more mature technology portfolio on which the folks in Palo Alto can draw upon if they get the integration right. Overall, this will be crucial in strengthening HP’s attack on Cisco’s UCC market share.

H3C S7506E

One of the big boons of the H3C portfolio in general is its energy efficiency. The S7506E is the greenest of the bunch, according to a recent report from independent performance testing firm Miercom. Miercom found that this switch has an annual operating cost that runs 24 percent lower than industry average.