The workstation market declined five per cent during the first quarter of this year, making it one of the hardest hit segments in the IT spending slowdown.

That's according to the latest statistics from analysts Gartner Dataquest, which reports a preliminary figure for workstation shipments of 358,829 in Q1 2002, down 5.4 per cent on the 379,296 shipments recorded in Q1 2001.

Dell extended its lead as the top vendor in worldwide workstation shipments, as its market share grew to 37.5 percent. IBM was the only other top-tier vendor in 2001 to experience an increase in shipments from the previous year, according to Gartner Dataquest.

Uncertainty surrounding the HPaQ merger and negative sentiment about Intel's Itanium also contributed in weak spending, the analysts note.

"The worldwide market is hampered by uncertainty because the US economy continues to be soft and the pending HP-Compaq merger may be leaving some end users undecided on product roadmaps. There are also signs of saturation in the U.S. workstation market," said Pia Rieppo, principal analyst covering workstations for Gartner Dataquest's Computing Platform Worldwide group. "In addition, there is little technological innovation to get excited about, with possible exception of notebook workstations, and the future of the Itanium product family is still undecided.

"All this uncertainty leads to conservatism in IT spending," she added. ®

Preliminary Worldwide Workstation Unit Shipment Estimates for 1Q02 (units)
Company	1Q02 Shipments	1Q02 Market Share (%)	1Q01 Shipments	1Q01 Market Share (%)	Growth(%)
Dell	134,700	37.5	109,048	28.8	23.5
Sun Microsystems	62,000	17.3	85,411	22.5	-27.4
Compaq	47,551	13.3	48,011	12.7	-1.0
IBM	46,303	12.9	40,829	10.8	13.4
Hewlett-Packard	36,600	10.2	56,611	14.9	-35.3
Others	31,676	8.8	39,386	10.4	-19.6
Total Market	358,829	100.0	379,296	100.0	-5.4

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