3COM is leaving this place out in the cold !!!!

[ftillman]

I am sub-contracting for a large institution in central Alabama and they have a couple million $ invested in 3Com ATM products, and the equipment only 1.5 years old. Nortel and Cisco are helping us come up with a solution to replace > Gig. Eth.

Has anybody got any comments on how we might salvage some of our 3Com investment?
What about after market?
Is anyone capable of picking up where 3Com is abandoning the market?
While USING and supporting the 3Com equipment in an efficient manner?
Any comments on why 3Com did this? What would you do in this situation?
Is there anyway to use what IS in place with 3Com and replace in a more cost effective way?
Do you suppose Johnny Cochran of Micahel Jackson could help?
What about OJ?

Yours Truly
busted flat in 3ComWorld

PS I do not think Boca Research OR AddtrOn would have done this to the IT world. Do you?

 

[wybnormal]

3com could not compete at the highend market. We were told by 3com that they *lost* an entire design dept. to a competitor and the audit team brought in to help recovery basicly told 3com management to forget it, cut you loses and run from the high end.

They left us high and dry THE DAY AFTER cutting to a new 4 9000 switch core and 2 years of effort rebuilding 4 sites. Soooo.. we blew them, got a decent trade from Cisco and just finished putting a new Cisco 6508 based core with a few 4000s to round things out.

Extreme supposedly is the "official" high end partner of 3com. In my humble opinion, they do not have the track record or the support structure in place for a true enterprise level facililty. The product has great stats adn the few users I know, love it. But, I need more then bleeding edge equipment. I need support, staff and so on. So I went with Cisco ( my first but overruled choice)

The switches work with 802.1q for VLANs to the 3com edges I have ( 3900s) and it has worked very well so far.

Nothing like a small adventure of the primary core provider leaving to get the blood flowing

Mike S

 

[proctorcw]

Couple of pieces of information on Extreme Networks.

1.) Their support infrastructure is in place. It isn't as grandiose as Cisco's but it doesn't need to be. (They only build Ethernet/POS switches... so they don't need all the SNA, Frame, etc etc departments.)
2.) I have instructed hundreds of people on the use of Extreme hardware now.... and the conversation about tech support has gone something like this. "Wow... Cisco has really great tech support. Does Extreme have tech support which is as good?" Notoriously... no one has ever had to call them for anything other than an RMA. Stop to consider what that says.... (And I'm talking places with hundreds of these devices... such as XDrive)

 

[wybnormal]

I do consider it... but when in Jan we had the small debacle of 3com bailing out unexpectedly, Extreme's support web page consisted of a single file.. a PDF of the owners manual. No hardware is built well enough to run without service packs and tweaks or upgrades. Even Extreme admited as much as I was involved with them editing whitepapers and offering suggestions for a new web site support structure by auditing new page designs and how they "worked" or not. They had the entire 3com enterprise support boondogle droppped into their lap and they were in no way ready for it.

Also, consider that many shops do not need to be on the absolute bleeding edge of performance. Many shops DO need to tie many dissimilier media/methodologies together like SNA, IP, IPX and LAT all over the same backbone. And when you do this, no matter how good the box is, there will be problems outside of your control that the customer will INSIST on you "fixing" or offering a suggestion for a workaround. Hence customer support is VERY important at Cisco and not just for problems with their own IOS/hardware.

As I told the hospitals I supported at the time, "you do not need to be on the *extreme* edge of anything, you need stablity" and Cisco offered and still offers that to the customer.

You can not make a blanket statement about one is better then the other without having ALL the requirements in front of you. The statement "(They only build Ethernet/POS switches... so they don't need all the SNA, Frame, etc etc departments.)" also says I am correct that Extreme is NOT yet an Enterprise level player because at the Enterprise level, You WILL have some of those etc.etc. depts to deal with and not supporting the mixed network is not a good way to win friends in high places. I suspect over time they will offer more and more and then we will see how it all shakes out. You also have Nortel and Juniper which make fine equipment and are hungry for some of the market share if not all of it ;-)

Mike S
"Diplomacy; the art of saying 'nice doggie' till you can find a rock" Wynn Catlin