Although 3Com has traditionally sold through the channel, the company is in the process of building a sales team to undertake an "enterprise attack".
3Com channel director Dean Vaughan said customers want more functionality at existing price points.
"Basically they want Layer 4 features at Layer 2 prices," he said.
3Com's strongest vertical in Australia is education where the company has inked deals across several states as many schools standardize on VOIP.
Claiming 3Com is one of the few companies to cover switching, security and convergence, Vaughan says open standards is driving many technology decisions.
"Customers don't mind having multiple suppliers; they don't want to be locked into one vendor," he added.
Next week at the RSA Conference in the US, 3Com will be showcasing a chassis-based version of its TippingPoint security switch that combines traffic-inspection duties with the scale of high-end data switching, up to 10G Ethernet.
The 3Com TippingPoint M60 will let customers consolidate intrusion-prevention system (IPS) and LAN switching in a single, high-scale chassis. The M60 can be used to consolidate traffic inspection for an entire organization while maintaining security separation between groups of users.