Hewlett-Packard has announced that it will buy networking equipment company 3Com. This comes on the heels of a recent announcement by Cisco Systems, the leader in the networking industry, that it would enter the server market to compete directly against HP.

The $3.1 billion planned purchase by HP ups the ante as a handful of companies vie for dominance in the corporate data center, with a full line of products, HP is already dominant in PCs, printers, and servers, and a major player in IT services.

One analyst is quoted as saying, “There are three big enterprise infrastructure vendors today: IBM, HP, and now Cisco. And they’re all competing against one another.” Ad Dell, which just bought IT service provider Perot Systems.

The usual cautions apply –- stockholders and antitrust officials have to approve the deal. Whatever happens, most analysts see this as just the beginning of a feeding frenzy in the IT world, as customers demand more one-stop solutions and once high-riding tech stocks are far more affordable than they were a year or two ago.

Tags: 3Com, Hewlett-Packard, HP, merger