(By Bob Blandeburgo) Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (NYSE: HPQ) pending buyout of 3Com Corp. (Nasdaq: COMS) highlights an accelerating race in the tech sector to grow businesses in an industry where development from within simply is not enough.

H-P will pay $2.7 billion in cash for 3Com, which is second to Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) in business networking. Cisco and H-P have steadily been encroaching on each other's businesses: Earlier this year, Cisco started making servers while H-P last year began to renew investment in its ProCurve networking business.

Deals like the one between H-P and 3Com are "part of a broader theme where there's a lot of talk of convergence in the data center," said Jayson Noland, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc. "Cisco and H-P are going to compete more and more."

PC market leaders like H-P and Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL) diversified away from their core business of desktop and laptop computers as the recession clamped down on consumer spending. Instead, they chose to focus more on enterprise servers, software and services.

Dell acquired Perot Systems Corp. (NYSE: PER) in a bid to capture more of the lucrative services sector and to take share away from H-P, which last year paid $13.9 billion for Electronic Data Systems LLC (EDS). Services now make up almost 31% of H-P's sales, compared to Dell's pre-Perot 10%.

"This was a move designed to try and catch up with its competitors," Kaufman Brothers LP analyst Shaw Wu told Bloomberg News. "[Dell was] behind in services and being vertically integrated. That's the model that worked – providing the hardware, software and services."

In the case of the H-P's acquisition of 3Com, the convergence lies in data centers, huge warehouses filled with servers that operate everything from Web sites to corporate networks.