Just days after news broke that it would be acquired by HP, 3Com introduced in the U.S. a line of enterprise Wi-Fi gear. The products, from 3Com’s China-based unit, H3C, encompass everything from wireless LAN access points to specially designed blades for H3C’s high-end data center switches, and an overarching management application.
3Com is touting what it calls the “Unified Network Access” products as creating a network edge that can intelligently handle both wired and wireless clients, integrates more tightly than rivals with the back-end switch fabric, and is priced about 25% lower than Wi-Fi products from Cisco and Aruba.
But there is one big question mark looming over this news: when HP acquired 3Com, it already had an enterprise Wi-Fi product line, based on HP’s 2008 buy-out of Colubris, which replaced HP’s reliance on rebranded Motorola WLAN gear. 3Com for its part had a long-standing Wi-Fi OEM relationship with Trapeze Networks. Neither 3Com nor HP has yet said what HP’s Wi-Fi strategy will be once the merger finalizes.
