Some big news in the networking world – HP announced today that they have entered into a “definitive agreement” where HP will purchase 3Com for a price of $7.90 per share or approximately $2.7 billion dollars. The terms of the transactions have been approved by the HP and 3Com boards of directors.

By purchasing 3COM, HP will benefit from 3Com’s portfolio of networking products – especially strengthening the company’s position in China which is one of the world’s fastest growing markets. According to Dave Donatelli, executive VP and GM of the Enterprise Servers and Networking group at HP,

“By acquiring 3Com, we are accelerating the execution of our Converged Infrastructure strategy and bringing disruptive change to the networking industry. 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”

This purchase will also complement HP’s vision of being a one-stop shop for all things related to data centers – from servers to storage; from networking to management; and of course services.

This deal is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

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