9/21/2004 -- 3Com Corporation last week introduced a new family of routers designed for both the SME and large enterprise markets.

The company says its new Router 6000 series can be deployed in the regional offices of large enterprise customers, or in the corporate headquarters of SMEs.

Among other features, the Router 6000 series supports MPLS, stateful packet inspection, firewall security, QoS, IPSec VPN services. WAN options include serial, E1, T1, E3, T3, ADSL and OC-3 ATM interfaces.

It looks like a near complete feature stack, says Joel Conover, a principal analyst for enterprise infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis. “3Com has a complete line of routers capable of addressing markets from SOHO to large enterprise,” he writes.

There’s a further wrinkle, however. 3Com claims the Router 6000 Series is interoperable with routers from Cisco and commissioned The Tolly Group—a third-party vendor that provides vendor-neutral validation of interoperability claims—to prove it. The upshot, says Conover, is that 3Com is taking aim at Cisco and other vendors in the SME and regional large enterprise markets.

“The Router 6000 is proof that 3Com intends to attack the enterprise router market from every possible angle,” Conover writes. “Unlike its competitors, 3Com has only a single software load for each of its router families, and that software load provides complete access to all features and functionality in the router, with no additional costs to activate specific features.”

That doesn’t mean 3Com is going to succeed, however: “[T]he company is missing its biggest opportunity and giving Cisco ample time to gain a strong hold on the market,” argues Conover. “Specifically, despite all of its VoIP technology, 3Com has yet to leverage any of that technology to make its routing offering more compelling competitively. This is by far 3Com’s biggest shortcoming and damages not only its competitive prospects, but also its VoIP sell-through capabilities.”

Elsewhere, Conover counsels, 3Com needs to expand its security development plans to keep the pressure on Cisco, Juniper and Enterasys, which all provide IDS technology that’s able to be integrated into the router. -Stephen Swoyer