Hewlett-Packard to Take Over 3Com For $2.7B

From DailyTech: Hewlett-Packard closed the business day on Wednesday by announcing a $2.7 billion acquisition of networking maker 3Com, as the company tries to increase its presence in China and other key foreign markets.

The deal has been approved by the board of directors of both HP and 3Com, with the deal expected to finalize in early 2010.

"By acquiring 3Com, we are accelerating the execution of our Converged Infrastructure strategy and bringing disruptive change to the networking industry," HP Enterprise Servers and Networking GM Dave Donatelli said in a statement. "By combining HP ProCurve offerings with 3Com's extensive set of solutions, we will enable customers to build a next-generation network infrastructure that supports customer needs from the edge of the network to the heart of the data center."

Ideally, HP will be able to utilize 3Com's Ethernet business in China and other developing markets, analysts point out. Immediately following the official close of the acquisition, expect a worldwide push of 3Com products under the HP brand name.

The company has attempted to wedge its way into Cisco's marketshare, but has been relatively unsuccessful so far -- HP and Cisco have worked together on a number of projects, but continue to butt heads, setting an interesting landscape in networking hardware and software.

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