Monday, November 16, 2009
HP to buy 3Com!
I just learned this weekend that Hewlett Packard intends to buy 3Com. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091111/bs_nm/us3com_hewlettpackard. This is exciting news for the SMB (small and medium business) market place. My experience providing HP solutions to my customers over the past 8 years has been extremely positive. Also, whenever HP has goofed up they have come back and made improvements to fix the problem. This is a sign that this company understands the marketplace. Recently, I've been working with the HP wireless LAN (Local Area Network) solutions and they are a terrific solution. What I love about HP is they find a way to make everything work better together for the customer. You can start your HP wireless network with just one access point and no expensive controller. When needed you can grow that network to enterprise levels and have the highest levels of security and compliance. What does the acquisition of 3Com mean to the SMB market place? For me, the most exiting part has to do with the potential development of an SMB offering of VOIP (Voice Over IP). For the last several years phone systems have been inching their way on to the data network but have still remained a separate purchase decision. Cisco and 3Com have been making inroads but I think HP will do it better and cost effectively. This means that a customer can have a network which is HP end to end. I'm generally cautious when thinking about putting all of my eggs in one basket. So I'll watch this closely, but guy can hope can't he. If they execute on this they way they did with wireless they should have a technology solution that is hard to beat.
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While I'm normally hesitant to put all my eggs in one basket as well this deal can only be a good thing for the industry and SMBs. Both 3Com and HP design their products to be standards compliant, unlike Cisco, so even if SMBs decide they don't want to be an entirely HP shop they can choose to go to any other standards compliant hardware/software and not have to worry if it will work or not. With Cisco this isn't the case and I've seen more and more people in SMBs realizing this over the past few years. As long as HP keeps doing what they're doing and leverages 3Com's strengths I think the SMB sector will have a company that they can trust with all of their hardware from the user on up and Cisco will finally have a true contender to hopefully take them down a few notches in the Corporate realm as well.
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