Buying again, hungry 3Com Corp, Santa Clara, California has this time gone for a company that raised a substantial sum in new venture capital only last summer. 3Com has definitive agreement to acquire San Jose-based based Centrum Communications Inc, which was formed to develop systems to enable roving to tap into the company network or public networks even when out of reach of a fixed phone. The price agreed is $36m and 3Com will write off a substantial majority of the purchase price and related costs in the current quarter. 3Com is excited at the way remote access systems are driving the growth of personal office networking as a growing number of business travellers, telecommuters and mobile users seek means to get at and manipulate data on their corporate databases. It believes that a marriage of Centrum’s remote access products and its own adaptor and internetworking expertise will enable it to extend the reach of its High Performance Scalable Networking architecture to the personal office. Centrum’s key product is CentrumRemote 3000, a scalable modular system that resides back at base and provides the highest levels of performance, network management and security for the greatest number of users dialling into the corporate network. Centrum will maintain its facilities and 35 employees in San Jose, as 3Com’s Personal Office division.
