Western Europe Server Blade Forecast, 2005-2009

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 81.5% in 2004 to represent 5.5% of all server units shipped. This performance is expected to continue over the coming years, with a predicted 31.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2009 in unit terms. Such growth would see 565,153 server blades shipments in 2009, representing one in every four x86 shipments. The revenue picture is just as positive, with server blades expected to generate $1,737.9 million in revenue in 2009, equating to a CAGR of 26.4% through this forecast period.

Factors contributing to this growth include:

A shift away from the physical value proposition (i.e., cable consolidation and shared redundant components) towards a management value proposition (i.e., streamlined systems management and business process automation) to coincide with a focus by all vendors on deploying such management capabilities. The migration of blades to EMEA from both U.S. companies replicating infrastructure across regions and also internally within organizations where blades have been deployed for specific applications and the value proposition demonstrated in practice. Market demand in the SMB segment will increase on the back of vertically integrated blade solutions where systems management is placed at the fore.

"IDC expects server blades to represent around one in every four systems shipped by 2009," said Daniel Fleischer, senior research analyst, European Enterprise Server Solutions. "However, there remain a number of hurdles which vendors need to cross first. 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. Today, issues such as the power and cooling of highly dense systems are now being placed at the fore as datacenter managers consider how they can indeed be integrated into legacy datacenters that would not have been built with server blades in mind. While today the blade remains a form-factor mainly for the large enterprise, looking forward we expect good growth to be seen in the SMB sector through the development of standard vertically integrated solutions again with management capabilities placed at the fore."