3Com stretches its web in Bangladesh

Published in The Daily Star
Section: Star Tech
Wed. December 24, 2003



Syed Tashfin Chowdhury

BANGLADESH is on 3Com's high priority map, which is reflected through our initiative for the market here," said Upender Jit Singh, regional sales manager of 3Com Corporation, South-East Asian region. 3Com, the world-renowned network appliance company, launched their routers in Bangladesh through a seminar December 15 at IDB Bhaban.

3Com is considered to be the global leader in functionally rich, easy-to-use networking products. Bob Metcalfe, one of the inventors of Ethernet technology on which virtually all local area networks are based, founded 3Com in 1979. Till date, 3Com has been a 'Tier 1' brand for their Internet protocol service platforms, wireless products and so on. At the moment, 3Com is competing with Cisco Systems Inc.

Previously, Bangladeshi resellers of 3Com products faced difficulties communicating with overseas distributors and thus have their message conveyed directly to the manufacturers. 3Com, currently, has two distributors in Bangladesh -- Ingram Micros and Techvalley. The company believes that through these local distributors the communication channel would be open and fair for both sides.

The company has also initiated a program through which they will train and educate resellers all over the region, so as to restore the competitive edge for 3Com products. Twice a year, 3Com University holds 'Partners3' program, a half-day training event, for the resellers' employees, in different cities throughout the world over a two-to-three month period.

The 'Partner3' program covers information about emerging technologies and helps the resellers to stay updated on 3Com products, services and solutions. "Our training program will ensure that the resellers are ready to face the future market demands," said Upender Jit Singh about the program.

3Com announced launch of its new state-of-the-art Router 3000 family and 5000 family. The 3000 family routers are the entry-level fixed configuration routers for edge deployment, whereas Router 5000 series are 3, 4 and 8 slot chassis routers for core routing deployments.

The 3Com router 3000 family delivers standards-based routing, fully compliant with a range of wide area networking interfaces, routing protocols and standards. These routers also support security features as firewall and Virtual Private Network (VPN), Systems Network Architecture (SNA), Data-Link Switching (DLsW) DHCP, and WAN dial-on-demand backup solutions. A variety of QoS(Quality of Service) features such as VLANs, bridging IP multicast and so on, are also available. The routers consist of high-performance 50 Mhz processor, support for up to 2,048 Mbps over serial WAN ports and 64 MB standard operating memory.

All Router 3000 routers come equipped with maximum operating memory and a complete set of routing, security features and applications set as standard unlike many competitive products.

The 3Com Router 5000 family involves flexible LAN and WAN componentsSmart Interface Cards (SICs) and Multi-function Interface Modules (MIMs), which provides scalable, efficient, and secure network operation.

Additional facilities include -- built-in support for converged voice, data, and video provides advanced Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic management capabilities, integrate seamlessly with the existing network equipment of the customer.

Compared with competing products, the price of these routers are 13 to 14 per cent lower and the memory provided is twice more than that of the competing products.

"These routers are full featured and high performance routers as compared to our competition" said Singh, "3Com offers the best price performance feature benefits and therefore the routers have been aggressively priced."