The rest, as they say, is history.

Read an earlier interview with HP's Haas about the ProCurve business 

"A year ago, Ron invited me to have a cup of coffee and was telling me about all the things they had in the works and how excited he was, and how in order for them to be successful they needed to align with a strong partner like HP," Haas said this week in an interview with Network World. "My reaction was good, interesting, let me go back and think about it."

Haas did -- and what he discovered were some glaring gaps in HP's own product line and road map.

"More and more I got to realize that in order for us to do it organically it would take longer than I was comfortable with," he said. "And the market opportunity is now."

Six months ago, HP started to look at all of the alternative available to it to fill those product gaps: acquiring Brocade or OEMing its Foundry Networks switches; acquiring Extreme Networks or Force 10 Networks; bidding for Nortel's enterprise business; and other options. One that was likely not considered was an arrangement with Cisco, which had just stomped on HP's toes by entering the server market at about the same time Haas was evaluating his product expansion options.

3Com rose to the top in that evaluation. Then at Interop in May, Sege and Haas met again. Haas had just put down the gauntlet that HP was prepared to become the clear alternative to Cisco in networking and 3Com was ready to expand beyond China with the availability of its H3C S 12500 core data center switch.

"We compared notes on how synergistic the product portfolios are and that again stirred up the conversation," Haas said. "They were looking for a provider that could provide consistent services around the globe and the ability to reach a broader set of customers outside of where they had tremendous success, which was in China."

HP two months ago set up a test combining its ProCurve switches with 3Com switches and routers in a prototypical data center/large enterprise architecture. HP evaluated network stress, high availability and scalability.