"To a great degree, however, much of what is being bandied about the market today is hype," says André Wollheim, HP product manager at Tarsus Technologies. "In this kind of environment, it is more important than ever for decision-makers to keep their eye on the ball."

Wollheim says this means observing the market trends, gauging what the demands are in their own organisations, and not being swept up in the excitement of cutting-edge developments being made on the technology front.

"That said, however, if the developments being made at the forefront of technology hold tangible benefits in terms of satisfying the organisation's demands, they must be considered.

"Overall, a couple of trends hold true for 2006. These are the factors that corporate buyers should keep in mind when making their future buying decisions," he says.

First up, Wollheim says that there is tangible evidence that AMD is becoming a stronger force in the market.

"This processor brand is gaining a great deal of mindshare with leading computer vendors, and corporates should be seriously considering looking at AMD-based alternatives, as they are truly competitive in the price/performance ranks.

"So far, we have noticed that when corporates buy, they either purchase entry-level computers for the great majority of their workforce, or top-end machines for their knowledge workers. Until now, Intel's Celeron was the entry-level choice," Wollheim reports. "But now by choosing an AMD-powered computer, corporates can keep their capital spending in line with what it was before, but at the same time they can benefit from additional performance.

"It is really something that is worth a second look," he states.

The second trend in terms of priority, Wollheim says, should be the storage capacities being demanded by the market. "With more of the workforce going mobile, these demands are changing. Mobile warriors need all of their data stored locally so that they can continue being productive while out of the office.

We're seeing massive strides in mobile storage capacities coming to the fore, with capacities as high as 160GB now plausible in a mobile computer. For this reason, when corporates next upgrade their notebook fleets, they must bear the available drive capacities in mind," he advises.

The third consideration, Wollheim says, is the fact that there is an increasing demand for memory in the corporate sector. "Currently the minimum RAM specification for running Windows XP is 256MB, with 512MB recommended. When Microsoft releases its upcoming Vista platform, which was recently delayed until the beginning of 2007, the recommended specification will shift to 2GB of RAM."