Worldwide Workstation 2006 Vendor Analysis

The workstation market is going through a transformation, and the results are positive. Different classes of the workstation business had dramatically different results. The traditional workstation (TWS) space continued to decline in 2005. A market that was once measured in billions of dollars is now measured in millions of dollars. Revenue for TWSs was $1.9 billion in 2002, while in 2005, it was only $536.6 million. Between 2004 and 2005 there was a drop of approximately $200 million in revenue alone.

The PWS class, on the other hand, has continued to grow and is forecast to continue to do so in both units and revenue. Revenue was $2.8 billion in 2002 and $4.2 billion in 2005," said Lloyd Cohen, research director of IDC's Enterprise Server Technologies group. "Users are migrating away from traditional workstations and moving to personal workstations. The large growth area is anticipated to be in the mobile workstation space moving forward as the performance in these mobile workstations has finally reached desktop performance. The introduction of duo core technology will only improve the performance of mobile workstations adding to the growth rate."