Add me to the list of those who got shafted by 3Com years ago.

Heck, I didn’t even know you guys were still around.

Historically, 3Com was rebadging a lot of hardware products and this lead to very poor customer experiences and, as the engineer being squeezed between the customer and crap 3Com products and services, there is an awful lot to forgive.

In recent years, nothing I have heard from my fellow engineers has said anything positive about your company – except for the words “cheap” and “get what you pay for”.

So you have a lot of work to do to even make me _think_ of _considering_ 3Com.

Nice try though.

I suggest that you take a closer look at 3Com. No other networking vendor is better positioned to challenge Cisco in the enterprise, since no other networking vendor can match our enterprise portfolio breadth ñ energy efficient core-to-edge LAN and WAN platforms; security featuring IPS, firewalls and UTMs; standalone and enterprise managed WLAN; and voice and unified communications solutions that scale to tens of thousands of users.

Additionally, with a common operating system that spans our comprehensive portfolio, a truly integrated and modular network management platform and more than 2,400 engineers in China ready to respond, 3Com can deliver solutions that help any enterprise customer achieve operational efficiency while driving innovation into their networking infrastructure and looking toward the future, especially in this challenging economic climate.

But a comprehensive portfolio doesnít do very much if customers arenít buying right? In addition to holding the #2 market share position for total switching ports, we are signing multi-million dollar deals that are further proof that 3Com is serious about the enterprise. Government of Israel and Swisscom are just a couple significant wins in EMEA that complement our global momentum. And thereís much more to come in 2009.

Joe Vukson
Enterprise Product Marketing
3Com

I can certainly understand concerns about Cisco losing its focus as it explores new markets, but I think it is ultimately a healthy thing for Cisco–we need to continue to take risks and test ourselves, otherwise we will become stagnant.

Looking at the data center space, in the last year, we have rolled out the Nexus 7000, 5000, and 1000V, a new unified data center OS (NX-OS), updated the Catalyst and MDS families and rolled-out technologies such as DCE, FCoE, and VN-Link–looking ahead to the coming year, we are not slackening the pace. It seems to me the SP folks have been equally busy with the new ASR 9000 and 1000. The Nexus and ASR are both new platforms, not just incremental updates, and they demonstrate both R&D commitment to-date and vectors for continued investment.

Omar Sultan
DC Solutions
Cisco