This week HP announced its intent to acquire networking vendor 3COM.  This acquisition certainly ups the growing competition amongst IT industry leaders – H-P, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.  As a networking infrastructure and VoIP/UC provider, 3COM brings some interesting assets to H-P and continues the circling/competitive motions of the large IT industry players – having significant impact on how the UC market will continue to evolve in 2010 and forward.

Several of the major launches/acquisitions over the past year, or so, include:

• Microsoft enters the Enterprise Voice Market – with OCS launch and extensions
• H-P accelerates its Services Market – with EDS acquisition
• Cisco enters the Datacenter/Server Market – with ICS and NEXUS and JV with EMC/VMware
• Avaya wins auction for Nortel Enterprise
• IBM expands its Collaboration into Telephony  – Sametime Unified Telephony

For a while now, speculation has been brewing over whether H-P would enter into the UC market and how it might respond to Cisco’s datacenter/server entry.  It may now be clearer.  Now the speculation has been answered, H-P announces its intent to acquire 3COM, giving it a stronger position in networking infrastructure and an entry-point into UC/VoIP.

As that long ago philosopher said about the UC market – “May you live in interesting times.”

[Editor’s Note: This post originally written by David Yedwab at our partner blog UC Strategies, and is reposted with permission. –mrh]