Emerged as the top RAS player. Also strong in switch.

For 3Com, fiscal 2000-01 was an eventful one. In December 2000, it made an announcement that it was spinning off its carrier business as a new company in the form of Commworks Inc. However, in India, even as the legal process of splitting its operations had started, till the end of the last fiscal, 3Com remained a combined entity of two separate lines of business—the carrier networking business and the consumer/commercial networking business. And, both did well in spite of the upheavals that were happening in the larger world stage.

During 2000-01, 3Com India emerged as the No. 4 networking products vendor in the country, doing an overall networking business of Rs 210 crore, growing by 50 percent over the previous year. While the carrier division contributed Rs 108 crore, the rest—Rs 102 crore was earned by the consumer/commercial business division.

3Com continues its excellent run in the RAS business. Among the capturing a percent market-share consumer ISPs, VSNL, Satyam and Caltiger—the three largest ones—are in its grasp. Also, there were large wins from other big incumbents like Mantra Online and Bharti Telenet, in addition to new contracts from big entrants like Tata ISP and Reliance, which promise to take it to better position in the current fiscal. 3Com also won contracts for the data access equipment provisioning from all six WILL service rollouts during the last fiscal. In fact, the BSNL order is a huge one, of which a large chunk will roll over into this year.

Despite a quite obvious hit on the high-end enterprise networking business, 3Com was seen hitting back in the mid-end of the switching equipment market. Major customers in this space included National Stock Exchange, Satyam Computers, and around 2,000-odd schools in Karnataka, Chandigarh, Punjab and Tamil Nadu.