This IDC study examines the Western European blade server market, providing historical shipment and revenue figures by country for the year 2006 and a forecast for 2007-2011. As enterprise spending continues to rebound, IDC expects the server blade market to remain the hyper-growth segment of the server market. Server blades grew by 37.1% in 2006 to represent 8.4% of all server units shipped worldwide and 10.4% in Western Europe. This performance is expected to continue over the coming years, with a predicted 34.2% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2011 in unit terms. Such growth would see 974,171 server blade shipments in 2011, representing more than one in every four x86 shipments.
"The shift towards dynamic IT computing models has now begun and the promised management capabilities of blades play extremely well here. Certainly, blades have seen good traction during the initial stages of IT simplification, proving to be an ideal platform for consolidation activities" said Nathaniel Martinez, program manager with IDC European Server Group.