Claflin calls Cisco technology ‘old, tired’

3Com's top executive marked the networking vendor's 25th year in business Wednesday with a promise to empower partners to aggressively go after enterprise business and what he dubbed Cisco System's 'great vulnerabilities.'

'I believe [Cisco's] technology is old and tired under the rubric of a proprietary operating system,' Bruce Claflin, president and CEO of 3Com said during an event.

Claflin, who was joined at 3Com's headquarters by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, credited Cisco's accomplishments.

But he referred to the networking market leader as an entrenched, successful competitor that tends to lock in customers and limit their ability to upgrade to better technologies.

'They have a cost structure that requires them to price non-competitively and their business model will never allow that price structure to stray, if they want to preserve shareholder value,' said Claflin.

Claflin also said channel partners are tired of Cisco's 'view of itself as lord of the mansion and of its partners as the surfs tilling the field. Our motto is the partners make the profits, as well, and we are careful not to over-distribute,' said Claflin.

3Com provides partners with a fundamentally different business model that offers a solid value proposition and leverages open industry standard technology, Claflin said.

Claflin acknowledged struggles, including the perception that 3Com is still largely a networking company associated with the edge of the network or connecting devices such as PCs.

'That's still a small part of our business, but 3Com's business today is overwhelmingly focused on enterprise networking systems,' Claflin said. 'But we need to do a better job of telling our story.'

To that end, Claflin said the company would continue to be aggressive in its marketing and advertising efforts, as well as focused on empowering channel partners and other target customers.