Gateway, 3Com partnership is imminent
zdnet.com
Another good news, a company has the same per share earning, similar growth rate, in the same industry is selling at 1/3 of Cisco's per share price. You can call it a bargain or you can call it bad wall-street management on 3COM's.
There's no time for rest at 3Com Corp. After inking a processor deal with Advanced RISC Machines Inc. and acquiring telephony expert NBX Corp., the networking giant is now negotiating an extensive partnership with Gateway Inc., Sm@rt Reseller has learned.
Under the terms of the proposed deal, Gateway will resell 3Com's family of OfficeConnect networking gear, including hubs, switches, remote access routers and ISDN LAN modems, among other products.
A spokeswoman for 3Com confirmed that a deal is imminent. "A March time frame [for a formal announcement] has been discussed," she said. "However, an actual date has not been secured."
Gateway has been an OEM partner of 3Com for some time. Most recently, Gateway in December endorsed 3Com's Fast EtherLink 10/100 network interface cards.
The pending 3Com/Gateway OfficeConnect partnership is the networking company's latest bid to corner the PC OEM market for networking gear. 3Com has inked similar deals with Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Micron Technologies Inc., Toshiba and Ingram Micro's unbranded system models.
Meanwhile, 3Com is also working to ensure that its NICs do not become commodity hardware. The company, as expected, is partnering with ARM to place a RISC processor directly on its next-generation Ethernet cards. The ARM deal is widely viewed as 3Com's latest attempt to head off Intel in the desktop PC connectivity market.
Separately, 3Com's acquisition of telephony expert NBX for $90 million this week could help the company meld voice and data communications over Ethernet networks.
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