Dataquest Forecasts Fair IT Weather Despite US PC Low

Market research company predicts continued industry growth mainly driven by multimedia chips

The IT industry is set to continue its boom period, despite a reduction for PCs in the US as the consumer market slows down in its growth.

According to predictions by market research firm Dataquest at its Service Trends conference in San Francisco last week, the total semiconductor industry will grow by about 13 per cent this year, up from last year?s figure of 9.4 per cent.

The market will be driven by multimedia chips, but Intel will have less than 50 per cent share of Pentium-class sales by 1998.

In the PC sector, Dataquest made an unusual statement backing Apple, maintaining the vendor would have a relatively strong year in 1997.

Worldwide PC sales will increase by 17.5 per cent to reach 85 million units this year, although the US market will see PC sales dropping off.

The telecoms industry will see some radical changes. Most notably, the 80:20 rule of network traffic ? 80 per cent local and 20 per cent backbone ? will be turned on its head as users deploy more intranet servers.

A poll of corporate clients showed the installation of intranets during 1997 and 1998 to be the major IT project in almost 80 per cent of sites, taking priority over the year 2000 conversion issue.