DVD-ROM for corporate PCs on back burner

After more than a year of hype for the high-capacity optical storage technology, no desktop system has been deployed with a DVD (Digital Versatile Disk)-ROM drive. And administrators still haven't put DVD-ROM drives in storage towers, where archives could eventually be stored in one-seventh of the space CDs use.

There's talk of a revolution, but analysts and vendors don't expect much for the corporate user before mid-1998, a full two years after the first DVD-ROM drives were announced.

"We're as much as a year out from any worthwhile content," said Mary Bourdon, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., in San Jose, Calif. "You might see a Christmas launch [of content], but that may not be strong."

Enterprises use CDs, which can hold 650MB, mainly for archiving data and delivering new software to PCs. DVDs' capacity--4.7GB