Research and Markets has announced the addition of "Blade Server: Market Opportunities, Strategies, and Forecasts, 2005 to 2010" to its offering.

Margins are slimmer on blade systems compared to mid-range systems. Manufacturers are attempting to gain market share and sell volume. The anticipation of making profits from supplemental service, such as warranties, consulting and systems integration is a market factor.

Blade servers consolidate and simplify the reduction of tangled cables. The spaghetti mess of 200 cables coming out of a 2-meter rack can be replaced with three to six cables saving as much as one half of the system cost. Replacing cables is significant for services as it is very easy to disconnect the wrong cable bringing down an entire system.

IBM is the market leader with 44 percent market share and Hewlett Packard has 25 percent share. This is reversed from two years ago when Hewlett Packard was worldwide blade server market shares with 56 percent in 2002 in a $158 million market. IBM was number two in the blade sever market with 22 percent market share participation.

Growth drivers are Linux clusters and blades. Server consolidation is driving UNIX low-end substitution. The small and medium business market represents over 50 percent of the Intel-based market.

IBM eServer BladeCenter family has already seen the fastest sales growth in IBM server history. Unlike other servers, BladeCenter systems collapse the complexity of corporate datacenters by integrating servers, networks, storage and applications in one system. Blades run Web sites and email systems, and also attack the most demanding computing tasks such as digital animation, genomic calculations and financial trading.