Turnover generated by the sale of workstations in Spain during 1994 totalled the equivalent of $55.6m and future growth is estimated at around 21% a year, reports SEDISI, the Spanish Association of Information Technology Companies. This growth rate is considered as somewhat lower than that of Spain’s European neighbours, due to the fact that there are few large engineering companies to provide greater impetus in this market area. But figures for the first quarter of 1995 are encouraging, showing turnover of $19.9m, up 37.7% on the same period in 1994. The dividing line between personal computers, workstations and, more recently, servers would appear to be increasingly hard to define, but sources consulted by the association concurred in distinguishing workstations by the Unix operating system, RISC architecture and a considerable capacity for managing information and running two- and three-dimensional graphics applications. Hewlett-Packard Espana SA’s workstation marketing director, Jose Estadella, was alone in choosing to swim against the tide of the overall findings, predicting that the European market would grow by 5% to 10% during the current year, while business in Spain would increase by 10% to 15%. Several of the companies consulted agreed that one of t he main challenges facing the workstation lies in extending its powerful presence in the technical sector to the commercial world. Sun Microsystems Iberica’s product manager, Carlos Ocon, said Sun had already confronted this challenge, and its machines are already present in both technical and financial and commercial markets. Estadella argued that technical fields are the natural market for workstations, in particular, manufacturing industry and telecommunications, and he concluded that the role of workstations in the financial and commercial world would always be of relatively lesser importance.
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