As the recession comes to an end, workstation shipments to Western, Central and Eastern European markets are expected to increase by 12,4% in volume in 2014, following two years of contraction.
This is according to the recent EMEA Quarterly Workstation Tracker results by leading global IT market research firm IDC.
“We are seeing signs of economic recovery, especially in the EU,” says Mohamed Hefny, senior analyst with IDC’s systems and infrastructure department. “The automotive industry is recuperating in the southern countries, and the construction business is resuming in Central Europe. Both sectors will be sources of workstation infrastructure investments, in order to support productivity and competitiveness.”
The next generation of workstation platforms will support more powerful processors with up to fourteen cores and faster DDR4 RAM, which will make them more appealing to high-end users.
Operating system migration and budget leftovers will drive strong enterprise refreshments in the last quarter of the calendar year, which should largely feature the next-generation models.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will likewise take advantage of the decreasing ASPs of entry-level machines, due to strong price competition between the four leading vendors: Dell, HP, Fujitsu and Lenovo.