Though no formal announcement of the end of the deal was ever made, a spokesperson for Concord, Massachusetts-based Crossbeam said it was terminated in mid-year.
OEM relationships are difficult, the source said. You have to get the business model right, and when you’re both in the same market, you have to question the value of it.
The two companies have been in the same market since 3Com’s acquisition, at the end of last year, of IPS vendor TippingPoint, whose technology 3Com always made plain would not find its way onto the Crossbeam device.
Neither side will comment as to whether this acquisition caused friction, but clearly TippingPoint was a leading IPS player and a competitor to the vendors Crossbeam is partnered with in this space.
Crossbeam does not create its own security software, but rather offers firewall/VPN from Check Point, IDS/IPS from Sourcefire or Enterasys, as well as the internal IPS product InterSpect from Check Point, AV from Trend, Aladdin or Panda, URL filtering from WebSense or Secure Computing and a wide variety of anti-spam offerings. What it brings to the table is the high-throughput networking platform on which they sit.
It was the company’s largest device, the C30, that Marlborough, Massachusetts-based 3Com signed up to OEM in November 2003, making much of the business generated in large enterprises and carriers as a result. Now, however, Crossbeam is beefing up its own sales and marketing resources to take its products to marketing under its own stream.
3Com confirmed that the deal had ended but made no further comment. Neither side would say who pulled the plug on the joint venture. However, the revelation comes hot on the heels of the announcement by an other 3Com partner, China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, that it would be entering the networking equipment market in Europe under its own brand.
It had previously agreed, as part of a manufacturing joint venture with 3Com, that the US firm would handle all international sales and marketing, while Huawei would limit iself to selling the kit in the Chinese market.
They have a Hong Kong-based joint venture that uses Huawei’s platforms with 3Com’s cash, and Huawei has the majority share until December, when 3Com has the opportunity to take over, said Peter Hullerman, senior research analyst on European telecoms and networking at IDC. The products are trimmed down versions of the Huawei products for service providers, so I’m not very optimistic about 3Com’s prospects.
He added that a lot of former 3Com customers still haven’t forgiven the company for its withdrawal of its high-end CoreBuilder product back in 2000, which left them without a technology roadmap from the vendor.
