3Com: Profiting From Big Blue?
3Com reported a narrow quarterly loss on March 22, but the bigger story is the company’s blossoming partnership with IBM. Within the next few days, The VAR Guy hears, IBM and 3Com will announce that they’re ready to ship an integrated IP telephony server with email, messaging and other business software.
The VAR Guy usually doesn’t get distracted by features and functions. But 3Com and IBM are delivering a pretty nifty list of capabilities. The IP telephony system will offer Lotus Sametime integration with “click to call, click to conference’ features. Also, a software development kit will allow VARs to integrate telephony into existing business applications. And a Contact Center application will potentially improve customer service with features like “screen pops” that share valuable application data in an instant.
Nice eye candy. But again, there’s a much bigger story here. While many vendors claim to be partnering on unified communications, IBM and 3Com are delivering the goods.
The unified communications push is the latest indication that 3Com may be turning around its business. As The VAR Guy told you in December, 3Com was among the 50 worst performing stocks of the past 10 years. Ouch. Anybody else remember when Palm was the hot property within 3Com’s crumbling empire? Now, it may actually be 3Com that shows greater strength heading into 2008.
Still, The VAR Guy is getting ahead of himself. 3Com isn’t profitable yet. Big rivals like Cisco and Nortel may dominate the news in the weeks ahead. And that open source VoIP system, Asterisk, has reached its tipping point. But instead of ignoring such threats, 3Com appears ready to embrace them. In fact, The VAR Guy hears that 3Com plans to address the Asterisk market within the next few months.
In the meantime, 3Com can speed dial IBM for plenty of help in the unified communications market.
no one else delivers the goods in unified communications???? Try Avaya, Juniper, Cisco, Extreme, Shoretel…
JJ: You’ve made a good point. The VAR Guy’s post was a little misleading in that area. He was referring to generic announcements between Cisco and IBM that promised little in the way of actual product.
To your point: The companies you mention individually are delivering unified communication solutions.
This blog was about partnerships, though. I’m sure you’ll agree that many unified communications partnerships promise a lot but deliver very little. In this case, IBM and 3Com are delivering the goods. That’s not to say other companies aren’t doing some fine work as well.
By the way, The VAR Guy rarely eats crow in front of so many strangers. It doesn’t taste very good.
One update: The VAR Guy just spoke with IBM/3Com. It’s important to note that this solutions runs on IBM’s System I servers — which are the “open” successors to the AS/400. So the solution targets IBM’s own System I VARs and resellers.
3Com itself also offers the solution for x86 servers.
– The VAR Guy
VarGuy, I like your style… and no crow needed, unless you get an order for two and a nice microbrew. As to partnerships, I think you’ll find the Avaya/Juniper/Extreme solution or the CIsco packages for example all comprise hardware much newer, more secure and more capable of handling voice/video/data traffic than a generic x86 or the now ancient System I. Keep up the good work,
jj
JJ: Good to have expert perspective from our readers. Thanks for checking in.
– The VAR Guy