Conflicting trends affect the market.
The trend in large systems continues away from proprietory systems, in favour of UNIX, or to downsizing to mid-range servers or distributed systems, although users are now far more cautious about abandoning their large systems. In the departmental server sector, machines based on Windows NT operating systems have eroded sales of UNIX servers, and clustering technology has become available on NT-based machines. Heavy competition and price cutting remains a feature of the PC sector, which has, however, grown very strongly in 1995 and 1996. Demand for computer hardware should continue to grow strongly in the next few years but will tend to be balanced by falling prices. More Information Key Note are leading publishers of market research reports.