Asia Pacific to overtake Europe

Despite its currency woes, Asia Pacific remains the fastest growing market for leading IT systems vendors such as HP.

At the end-of-year conference of the company's Information Storage Group, HP executive Roger Archibald said the company expects that Asia Pacific will overtake Europe to become the world's second largest market for IT systems after the US.

Mr Archibald told the Bali conference, attended by HP representatives and resellers from most countries in Asia Pacific, the company recorded an overall growth rate of 39-40 per cent. In 1997, North Asian countries showed 76 per cent growth, while the Australian market increased by nine per cent.

The fastest growing market was China, which recorded growth of 122 per cent last year, while India grew by 103 per cent, said See Chin Teik, sales and marketing manager for ISG in Asia Pacific.

Although the region showed considerable growth, he said there was still very low penetration of extended storage products in the SOHO PC market, as well as "high unprotected server" installations throughout the region.

Mr See was referring to the number of servers that do not have any form of extended back-up solution, a situation HP is keen to address.

The Internet, multimedia and email should all lead to further demand for extended storage solutions, such as CD-R, CD-rewritable, DVD and a host of tape solutions.

Meanwhile, the integration of a storage management application within the next-generation of Windows NT 5.0 will result in easier integration of jukeboxes and tape libraries, theoretically lowering the entry point for potential users of these solutions.