Reaffirming its position in the enterprise networking equipment space, Nortel Networks on Monday became the latest equipment vendor to offer a rebate program for 3Com and Lucent Technologies customers lost in the wake of the companies' recent exits from specific enterprise product areas.
Nortel said it is offering competitive rebates on trade-ins of recently discontinued 3Com data products and Lucent voice equipment. Nortel's program follows on the heels of similar rebate announcements from Foundry Networks and Cabletron Systems' Enterasys Networks attempting to gain customers from 3Com's exit.
Last month 3Com officials said that the company will discontinue the CoreBuilder LAN switch line, as well as the PathBuilder and NetBuilder WAN core product lines by June 30. To ease the transition, 3Com expanded its alliance with Extreme Networks, giving customers a migration path to Extreme's Summit and BlackDiamond switches. Officials at 3Com said its PathBuilder and NetBuilder lines would be handed off to Motorola by transferring some technology and employees to Motorola. Lucent, meanwhile, revealed plans last month to spin off slower growing enterprise business units, including enterprise PBX, cabling, and call centre technology. Lucent said the spin off would be completed by September.