THE ECONOMIC MARKET PLACE

Abstract

The major change in the library automation market place over recent years has been in the escalation of competition among suppliers. The key factors in this are: the approach of maturity in the existing large system market; the fixed nature of the existing market size; the low product differentiation; and the increase in customer critical awareness — buyer power in other words. Increasingly there is evidence of the merging of the objectives of previously quite disparate organisations, namely the traditional cooperatives and the turnkey/ commercial suppliers. This is accompanied by a growing lack of product differentiation as both types of organisation compete for the same pool of customers with products demonstrating a common range of fairly comprehensive but predictable facilities.