3Com jumps into Cisco-Huawei fight

3Com last week piped up in the legal struggle between Cisco and Huawei Technologies, filing a motion with the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Texas to intervene.

3Com is planning to be an OEM of Huawei, and this week Network World reports 3Com is unveiling a switch based on the Chinese company’s technology. The switch is intended to get 3Com back into the enterprise LAN core switch market, a market it abandoned several years ago:

https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/06163com.html

While that would normally be a straightforward OEM arrangement, Huawei is currently being sued by Cisco, which is accusing Huawei of stealing its intellectual property.

That’s what prompted 3Com to intervene. In a statement, 3Com says it is taking the action to prepare for the launch of a joint venture with Huawei announced in March.

3Com told the court that the products it is getting from Huawei are very different from the products under dispute. The dispute is mainly over routing code, and the Huawei/3Com products are switches.

3Com and Huawei have asked the court to declare their products original and free from intellectual property violations.

Whatever happens, we are bound to hear a lot more from Huawei. It’s the first new company in a long time to challenge Cisco. It may cause more trouble for Cisco overseas, as Cisco takes its intellectual property battle there, while working through 3Com to gain a foothold here in the U.S.