J.P. Gownder and his colleagues from Forester Research released a new 14 page report titled “Home Servers In The Digital Age”, which is available to download at no cost from Microsoft’s web site.

Consumers’ growing digital assets in the form of music, photos, and video will require backup, management, and streaming. In multiple-PC households, complexity has grown, while backup behavior has stalled. Home servers can address these concerns and can also act as hubs for the digital home, streaming content across PCs and into the living room itself. While the need for home servers is clear, articulating their value proposition to most consumers will be very difficult. Technology marketers must overcome consumers’ ignorance and significant retail challenges to overcome some very high marketing hurdles. Expect Microsoft’s launch of Windows Home Server in 2008 to raise awareness and give a jolt to adoption of this product. But it will take a long time for the home server market to take off. Forrester’s forecast suggests that home servers will become an important product category for the digital home by 2012.

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