Thursday, March 20, 2008

3Com Acquisition

3Com is an interesting company. Back in the day they were everywhere....lots of products, lots of market penetration. Then, there are times where I forget they even exist and just don't hear much about them or their products. With a founder like Robert Metcalfe : the founder and co-inventor of a little thing called.... Ethernet, how could the company go wrong?

3Com has been in the limelight recently in the M&A saga section. Boston's Bain Capital Partners and China's Huawei Technologies were bidding to acquire 3Com and ComputerWorld reported today that this bid was abandoned. The reason is the interesting part. In January 2005 3Com acquired security company TippingPoint The ComputerWorld article explains that the U.S. Department of Defense uses 3Com IDS products. The acquisition has been halted apparently due to security concerns and the fact that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. intended to take action to prohibit the sale. This TippingPoint software must be really good -- I had always figured the DoD wrote their own software for IDS/IPS.

Check out the ComputerWorld article here

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