3Com banks on open-source strategy

Speaking at a media briefing in Malaysia on Tuesday, Peter Chai, vice president and general manager of 3Com Asia-Pacific, said the company's open services networking (OSN) platform will enable its customers to create and build relevant applications on top of its hardware offerings. The OSN infrastructure runs on Linux.

Chai explained: "Developers [can] build third-party applications, or customers [can] develop their own applications to work on top of our products. This is our unique selling point."

According to the executive, the US-based networking gear maker is number two in the global market, behind current leader Cisco.

Despite this, Chai said 3Com is poised to further grow its market share by leveraging the OSN strategy to differentiate the company from its competitors.

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