Hewlett-Packard Co is making it a practice to cement commercial partnerships by taking minority equity stakes in its smaller partners, and the latest to benefit is 3Com Corp, San Jose, in which Hewlett will initially take up to 5%. The collaboration with 3Com on distributed computing covers products that will combine 3Com’s 3+Open LAN Manager operating system; the HP LAN Manager/X version for Unix being jointly developed by Hewlett and Microsoft; Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol; network management under the HP OpenView architecture; electronic mail; and Hewlett’s NewWave environment. The two firms will work together to promote LAN Manager as a standard across multiple computer types, and Hewlett has a letter of intent for an OEM contract for 3+Open, to be the basis of HP 3+Open LAN Manager for OS/2.
