Under the cash transaction, HP will pay $7.90 per 3Com share. The terms of the transaction have been approved by the HP and 3Com boards of directors.

The companies hope their combined entity will give Cisco a run-for-the-money in data center networking and convergence.

"Companies are looking for ways to break free from the business limitations imposed by a networking paradigm that has been dominated by a single vendor," said Dave Donatelli, HP’s executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers and Networking, in a statement. "By combining HP ProCurve offerings with 3Com’s extensive set of solutions, we will enable customers to build a next-generation network infrastructure that supports customer needs from the edge of the network to the heart of the data center."

3Com recently re-entered the North America large enterprise switching stage after years of . The company boasts a wide array of switching platforms – from workgroup, to wiring closet edge to deep data center core – after acquiring the whole of a joint venture it had with Huawei called H3C.