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