And both Dataquest and IDC tout their contacts among retailers, resellers, vendors, as being superior to its competitor.

'We rely on primary research - every quarter we talk directly to vendors - as opposed to using spreadsheet models,' Nathan Hill, IDC Hong Kong's marketing manager, said. 'We have actual feet on the ground.' Dataquest, which was bought out in December by the information consultancy organisation, the Gartner Group, touts its new worldwide network of more than 450 researchers and analysts brought together by the merger. Bob Steiner, the head of administration for Dataquest Asia-Pacific, based in Hong Kong, said that figure is larger than IDC.

The number of Dataquest researchers was sure to grow this year, Mr Steiner said, as the company started emphasising its consulting services and the provision of qualitative, rather than quantitative data and analysis.

Dataquest earned slightly less than HK$80 million in revenues from its Asia-Pacific operations last year, according to Mr Steiner.

IDC would not release revenue figures for this region.

But as Asian markets boom, Dataquest and other market research groups hope to cash in.

Dataquest has been on a hiring, firing, and reorganising binge in the last two months. Four junior staffers were released in January, including one just-hired personal computer industry analyst, Mr Steiner said.

Dataquest was streamlining its operations, Mr Steiner said. The San Jose, California-based group is also attempting to reorganise the company along the functional, rather than regional, lines of its new parent company, the Gartner Group.

That meant that analysts, who formerly worked in regionally-based research groups, would now lead them. Dataquest was bought out by Gartner in early December for US$75 million. It was founded in 1971 as the research arm of a small American brokerage firm. Dataquest was then bought by A. C. Neilsen company in the late 1970s and then acquired by Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, which also has a major stake in the Gartner Group.

One of the victims of Dataquest's reorganisation was Glenn Rasmussen, whose position as regional director of Asia-Pacific, was eliminated.

Mr Rasmussen is now heading sales and consulting for Dataquest Asia-Pacific. Mr Rasmussen formerly owned ResearchAsia, a Hong Kong market research company, which was a local subcontractor for Dataquest in this region.

ResearchAsia was bought out by Dataquest in December 1994. Many current Dataquest staffers in Hong Kong were former employees at ResearchAsia.

Dataquest has about 14 analysts and researchers in Hong Kong, and about the same number of sales staff.

Dataquest used to consist of autonomous offices with a self-contained administration for each country. This was effective when Dataquest limited its analysis to a country-by-country basis, Mr Steiner said.

'But we're now trying for a more comprehensive well-integrated regional look,' he said.

With Dataquest's corporate realignment from regional on to functional lines - analysts will nominally lead Asia-wide research teams which will report to heads back in the United States - some positions were shuffled and became redundant.

Released was analyst Darren George, who was hired in December to help replace Niall O'Reilly, Dataquest's former senior PC analyst. Mr O'Reilly, left in December to become Dell Computing's new regional head of strategic marketing.

Mr George was to work with Cherry Velarde, former reporter for Asian Computer Weekly, as a two-person team to fill the big shoes of Mr O'Reilly. But in January, Dataquest 'reevaluated all of our staffing needs', Mr Steiner said.

'In many places we are adding. And in some places, we are dropping the less skilled.' Mr George formerly headed media research at Survey Research Group (SRG) in Hong Kong.

But he told the Technology Post in January that it would take him a few months to get a handle on Asia's PC market.

That apparently was too long for Dataquest, which released Mr George in the middle of January only about six weeks after they hired him.

But Mr Steiner emphasised that Mr George and the other three staffers were as much victims of restructuring, already planned before the Gartner buyout, than any perceived lack of skills.

Added to Dataquest's five-person analytical team three months ago was Anthony Ko, who Mr Steiner described as a very experienced researcher in the area of major computer systems and client/server projects.

Dataquest will try to leverage its strong market research in the European and North American markets for use in Asia-Pacific, a booming region where high-quality market research is still relatively scarce.

Otherwise, the Gartner Group will pretty much leave Dataquest alone, according to Mr Steiner. Unlike Dataquest, which has a strong reputation in vendor-side data, Gartner has traditionally emphasised customer and user-side market data.

Gartner was well-established in Australia but only has a single salesman in Hong Kong, Mr Steiner said.

There are no plans to bring a Gartner manager to oversee the Dataquest office here, he said.

IDC, meanwhile, has about 50 staffers in its Hong Kong office. More than 80 per cent were involved in research and analysis, IDC Hong Kong's Mr Hill said. IDC planned to expand its coverage of markets in Vietnam and mainland China, he said.

IDC is the consulting and research subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), a multi-billion dollar publisher of more than 215 computer magazines and books. IDG is based in Framingham, Massachusetts in the United States.

In Hong Kong, IDG publishes Computerworld Hong Kong and PC World Hong Kong.