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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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turnaround expert
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 17)
SM: Whom did you sell the high end product line to? EB: We sold it to Extreme. We put Extreme in business. It was a bad decision because the analysis was wrong. It was taken in an overheated period, by an over impatient board who were comparing ourselves with companies whose growth rate was inflated
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 14)
3Com acquired US Robotics, and then USR started shrinking in the modem market, one of its primary franchises. In a royal nightmare that ensued, Eric lost the advantage that 3Com had built as part of its first turnaround. SM: Were there any positives which came out of this mess? EB: The only thing that came
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 13)
3Com challenged Cisco with a Boundary Router strategy that threatened Cisco’s core router franchise. SM: So what prevented you from finally catching Cisco and passing them? EB: In 1997, there was one major shock for 3Com. More and more enterprise networks had to extend into carrier networks. Enterprises could not build all of these large
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 12)
SM: Is this when you began to close the gap on Cisco? EB: There was one play that we used which enabled us to close in on Cisco, and we called it Boundary Routing. Cisco was driven to more complex solutions than us. They positioned routing as something of a magic art, very complicated and
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 11)
SM: Did the market understand your positioning as an integrated networking solution? EB: I think they did. Of course we were coming from behind in routers, and we were behind SynOptics in hubs, and we were behind others in single categories. We started to strengthen our position in all our segments, and this helped because
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 10)
3Com started growing revenues again in 1992 on the strengths of new products. The company grew about 15 fold in a decade, in terms of revenues, and became profitable again. SM: That was a golden age in networking! EB: Yes, and shareholder value went from the million range to billion range. It was fun, because
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 9)
SM: One question about your managing the board during that difficult period. What did you learn from that process, and how did the board react positively, negatively, especially looking back today? EB: It was very gutsy on the part of the board to ask me to take the lead on this company. I had never
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 8)
SM: In general, was the workforce at 3Com more aligned with your vision than to Krause’s? EB: It was a split workforce. We had some computer experts, and we had some networking experts. What I ended up doing was to choose one – we could not do both. We built upon our roots at Bridge,
