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ABI Research: Network Storage to Be Fastest Growing Core Home Networking Category (15/7/2008)

The home networking market is entering a phase of slowing growth. Many consumers have already purchased a home networking device, and other factors include continued pricing pressure and a lack of strong demand from consumers wishing to upgrade to newer technologies. One category, however, that will see continued growth through the next five years will be network storage, which ABI Research calculates at something under $400 million worldwide today but growing to just over $1.4 billion worldwide by 2013.

"ABI Research believes that network storage will see more consumer pull-based demand in coming years, though we never expect consumer network storage to see the same type of overall market demand as we've seen in the home router and gateway market," says research director Michael Wolf. "That being said, we think overall adoption of consumer network storage will grow significantly from the 10% of home network owners today who use network attached storage."

While network storage among consumers will see an overall growth rate of 26% annually over the next five years, there are still significant hurdles for this newer technology. Low cost USB hard drives which are widely adopted by consumers today as well as the increasing number of options for "cloud" based storage on the Internet will compete with network storage, which is seen by some as more difficult to install than these options.

"More and more consumers will see a need for both backup and central storage of digital files," notes Wolf. "While cloud-based storage services offer a good way for consumers to access content remotely, there is no beating the speed of local network storage. We think ultimately consumers will choose a mix of both online and locally based network storage."

ABI Research's "Home Networking Forecast" (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/market_data/Home_Networking_ Forecasts) contains market forecasts for a variety of networked devices including DVD players, TVs, mobile media players, game consoles, set-top boxes, media adapters, digital cameras and AV players. It also presents forecasts related to networking devices and interfaces and to the to the installed base of home networking households.

www.abiresearch.com