Industry analysts have identified the crushing disillusionment that so rapidly replaced the tech euphoria of the late nineties. They have named it “The Trough of Disillusionment” – following as it does the pinnacle of hype.

Although the likes of Sun Microsystems and IBM traditionally advertise their dominance of the server market, it is the smaller, workgroup class servers from Dell and HP (Compaq) and others that account for nearly 90 percent of server sales – and are currently the only server products showing double digit sales growth in a depressed market.