Attacking Cisco's router strength

Electronic News, Feb 2, 1998 by Carolyn Whelan

This year, No. 2 networking player 3Com said it wants to win over 30% of Cisco's $1 billion router business. Top-seated Cisco had 56 percent of the worldwide router market in 3Q97, compared with only 6 percent for 3Com.

Last Monday 3 Com and Newbridge Networks announced a strategic alliance to develop and deploy next-generation, end-to-end networks supporting converged voice, video and data applications by combining their strengths in LAN and WAN technologies. They plan on jointly providing enterprise infrastructures that employ standards-based techniques for network traffic prioritization and policy control.

As part of the alliance, 3Com will resell Newbridge's ATM WAN switching system, the MainstreetXpress 36170 and WAN network management software, the MainStreetXpress 460260. Newbridge will resell 3Com's SuperStack CoreBuilder and AccessBuilder products in conjunction with its Multiprotocol-over-ATM-based switched routing system. Corebuilder is 3Com's Layer 3 Line. Switch routers are also being rolled out this year by Bay Networks under the Accelar brand.

3Com also announced the addition of Voice Over IP capabilities for its Total Control Remote Access Concentrator, which enables service providers to add services like voice, fax, video, virtual private networking and content on a single platform.

"The demand is for high performance, and we've just opened the floodgates, making 10/10,000 Mbps an irresistible choice and Gigabit Ethernet a realistic top-end migration path," said Ron Sege, senior VP of 3Com's Enterprise Systems. "This breakthrough technology will ignite the market."