Abstract
This IDC study looks at the worldwide and U.S. markets for home servers and
forecasts market growth out through 2012. The forecasts presented here include
segmentation for consumer and commercial adoption. While we believe the largest
opportunity for home server products will be technology-savvy consumers, we
believe commercial users, primarily small businesses, will also utilize the
home server platform as a backup solution.
"PC shipments into the consumer market segment have been driving PC growth for
the past three years. The increasingly large number of homes with multiple PCs
and a network installed make the concept of a home computing platform a logical
next step for the home computing environment. Still, this product category is
in its infancy, and the benefits of a home server and the education behind the
technology needed to realize those benefits as well as further development of
new features for home servers are part of a long-term effort. Additionally,
there are competing digital home strategies and other one-dimensional
solutions, such as external backup storage, that offer some of the same
capabilities of the current home server platform, creating significant
distractions to consumers and obstacles for the concept of the home server." -
Al Gillen, research VP, System Software; Jonathan Gaw, research manager,
Consumer Markets: Home Networking; Brett Waldman, research analyst,
Infrastructure; and Richard Shim, research manager, Personal Computing
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