Hewlett-Packard has been making hard choices over the past year but the aggression seems to be paying off. The EDS acquisition has become the most profitable part of the company, market share has held steady or increased and now the company has announced plans to acquire network company 3Com to extend its reach in the networking sphere.

The $2.7 billion deal causes HP to raise its outlook for FY 2010 and puts it in a strong position to compete with networking giant Cisco System, which itself has been making efforts to move toward HP-style service offerings. More importantly, the deal will give HP a stronger hand in the emerging market of China, where 3Com has a market leader in its H3C networking unit.

From my anecdotal observations, HP has been increasingly well received in enterprise IT circles, seemingly having gained almost complete initiative over Dell in both sales and services. 3Com is similarly well-regarded and will no doubt serve to strengthen HP's hand even further in closing large enterprise deals.