"Theys till have a lot of work in front of them to become a significant player in the data networking space. There are too many players in this market, and some consolidation would be helpful to create a company that's big enough to compete against Cisco," Recarey says. "Especially in the U.S. and Western Europe, H3C has a lot to do."

    The second most interesting facet of 3Com is arguably TippingPoint Technologies Inc. 's line of security products. TippingPoint was slated for a spinoff earlier this year, and 3Com executives said today they will continue working to divorce TippingPoint's operations from 3Com. (See 3Com to IPO TippingPoint.) Whether TippingPoint goes public, as originally planned, would be up to the new owners.