In anticipating fate for once big giant 3Com, an un-anticipating powerhouse HP made a move to acquire the company that once invented ethernet and remains the largest patent holder in US . On November 11th 2009, 3Com and HP released joined press release announcing 3Com's buy out.  ( Press Release) Acquisition of 3Com allows HP to speed up and jump into some of the marketshare where HP had none or very small presence. 3Com's division, H3C, which was the child of venture with Huiwei, has been making alot of progress both in US and abroad. H3C product outsell Cisco in Asian markets. In US, H3C products are branded 3Com and in recent quarters 3Com showed not improvement but actually a profit ( first since 2000) due to the sales of networking products that are engineered by H3C division. 3Com also holds a small, but a solid marketshare in IP Telephony, HP has lacked anything and everything in this particular convergence offering. 3Com's most prised procession - TippingPoint.  TippingPoint is a line of security products that originally aimed at enterprise and now scale down to SMB markets. TippingPoing IPS ( Intrusion Prevention System) is industry's leading edge security solution deployed by many enterprises including WalMart, as well as many government agencies such as Department of Homeland Security.
HP in one shot,  eliminated a competitor for it's networking products, especially in SMB and small enterprise.Got themselves a convergence package and beefed it's security to the max with TippingPoint.
The only other potential company that may have done this was IBM.  IBM had a long standing relationship with 3Com, distributing 3Com's VCX IP Telephony Platform on the i-Series Servers.
This is great news to 3Com's customers and vendors. This will definitely benefit both, as HPs marketing is what 3Com always lacked