Compaq plans to be the leader in numbers in workstations in Germany and is actually starting a new business unit for sales and support. Special offers are planned for universities, software developers and frustrated Unix users. Andreas Zilch, Research Director META Group Germany, gave an overview of the German market. Zilch highlighted the situation of the German users. IT is recognised as an important factor in production, but investments in the industrial and private sector are both cautious and reserved.
Industry wants homogeneous environments - heterogeneous systems are installed only in special cases.
But real cost of ownership is the most important criterium. Although Digital was strong in Germany with its Vaxes, they did not succeed with workstations in their traditional market. Now there is competition from NT-based workstations. If one looks at the number of systems, these come to 250,000 or so in 1997 and a bit higher in 2001 for traditional workstations. Zilch compared the PC- and the workstation market and concluded that these segments have different demands.