3Com brings H3C products worldwide 11 May, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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Formed as a joint venture with Huawei Technologies in 2003, 3Com has since purchased controlling interest in H3C and now the networking vendor is taking what has been a successful venture in China global.

"It's about bringing our H3C brands to the rest of the world and disrupting the state and flow within the enterprise networking environment," said Dominic Wilde, senior director of global product line management at 3Com.

The timing -- being in the middle of a recession -- may seem odd, but Wilde noted that several major companies in various industries have grown into powerhouses during down economies. The H3C products were designed to dramatically drive down costs and be disruptive across the spectrum of the market, he said.

"We believe that now is the right time and the right economic environment to do this," he said.

As Wilde described it, there is a perfect storm happening in the industry that should ultimately benefit 3Com. With the economy in a transition period and there's more pressure on organization to do more with less, there's a lot of consolidation going on amongst vendors and customers are looking for alternatives to their tradition suppliers. That's where 3Com hopes H3C will fit in.

3Com is launching all of the H3C products worldwide, providing an end-to-end enterprise networking portfolio, Wilde said. In addition, 3Com is launching three new products through June and July under the H3C brand.

The H3C S12500 is a datacenter aggregation and enterprise core switch that can deliver 2.2 billion packets per second of forwarding through 6.6Tbps non-blocking fabric. It also has up to 128 10-gigabit or 864 gigabit Ethernet non-blocking ports. According to Wilde, it also uses 50 per cent less power than competing products but twice the power. 3Com is targeting Cisco Systems' Nexus switches with the S12500.

"This is a very impressive kind of big iron switch," Wilde said.

Another new addition to the portfolio is the H3C S5800 switch, which offers up to 192 10-gigabit or 640 gigabit Ethernet ports. It's being positioned as "flex-chassis," which 3Com defines as a fixed configuration switch with hotswappable elements like I/O modules and power supplies. Essentially, it was designed to provide flexible service delivery in a fixed form factor.

"The key here is you can group these switches together into virtual groups," Wilde said.

The last of the three products is Intelligent Management Center (IMC), which is a single-pane management platform built on service oriented architecture (SOA). It was designed to manage large heterogeneous networks.

"It's very much a unifying product," Wilde said. IMC can manage both 3Com/H3C products as well as products from other vendors.

For the channel, this marks a point where 3Com will be ramping up its channel presence in the enterprise networking space.

"Our go-to-market model will retain the channel model that 3Com has had for 30 years. We intend to continue that. Our business was built through our partners and we continue to do that and will continue to do that through the introduction of the H3C certification program," said Alex Dobson, vice president and general manager of North America at 3Com.

Since H3C is much more focused on the large enterprise than 3Com's other brands, the company is looking for new channel partners, although Dobson said there are some existing 3Com partners that will fit well with the H3C brand. It'll be a by-invite-only program, and 3Com is looking for networking resellers that serve the Fortune 1000.

"We're really looking for enterprise resellers that have experience and have the capabilities and in-house expertise to truly support and engage with the enterprise that the product portfolio that we have really can connect with. The object is we can maximize partner revenue and profitability, and we've created a very comprehensive training and support model," Dobson said.

Of the new products, the switches will be available in July, while IMC will be available in June.