These are a few highlights from Itops '99, the latest in the series of Itops reports designed to monitor the market for IT hardware in India. Itops is the only end-user based syndicated study in existence since 1996-97, by virtue of which it has established its role as an essential tool in the resource planning portfolio of any hardware vendor, or brand marketer. From an annual exercise upto '98, Itops has since the last year been tracking the market on a bi-annual basis thereby increasing the sensitivity of the product to identify and highlight changes that may be taking place in product or configuration preference, as well as, in user profile and segments.

Itops is based entirely on face-to-face interviews with IT managers / CIOs in user establishments, as well as among affluent homes the two broad segments covered by Itops. Since inception over 70,000 face-to-face interviews have been conducted in the Itops exercise adding stability and strength to the data base with each consecutive round. Each bi-annual round now covers over 10,000 face-to-face interviews randomly sampled from the universe which is defined as all telephone owning businesses and affluent (Socio Economic Class A and B) homes.

Itops covers all four classes with over 1.0 million population (24 towns in all). The study is conducted as per the following schedule :

• H1 (April to September) market
  
  
  • Data collection in October & November
  • Reports released by mid-December
  
  
  
• H2 (October to March) market
  
  
  • Data collection in April & May
  • Reports released by Mid June