"This offering is intended to directly address customers' expressed, continued frustration with competitive solutions that employ proprietary protocols, force vendor lock-in and are overpriced." - Mehmet Balos, 3Com.
As far as routers and switches and all of those sorts of networking devices go, Cisco is king. They practically wrote the book on routing, and many modern networking technologies (which make it possible for you to read this news) came from their innovative minds. But this doesn't stop rival 3Com from trying to invade the market with some products that really rival Cisco offerings. 3Com are releasing a new line of advanced switches available at lower prices than those offered by Cisco.
The new products are the 8800 family of Terabit core switches, which come in three varieties. Prices range from $26,0000 for a smaller 7-slot system to $36,000 for the 14-slot version. These products are clearly an attempt to reach into the enterprise market, surely a trend set to continue. How successful 3Com will be against the market leader Cisco is anyone's guess at this stage, but I think we would all admit that competition in any market is good.