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IT organisations utilising blade servers need to be ready for changes in the technology, according to Gartner.

Blade-server growth will be limited during the next five years - despite the technology representing the fastest-growing segment of the server market, the analysts say.

This lack of growth will be due to continued, rapid change and a lack of standards.

While a compound annual growth rate of 19 per cent is predicted for blade shipments from 2007 through to 2012, this will not equal market domination, as blades only represented 10 per cent of shipments in 2007 and will only rise to 20 per cent in 2012.

However, Gartner did not want to put companies off buying the servers.

‘We are not suggesting that IT organisations stay away from blades - blades do address many problems in the data centre,’ said the vice president of Gartner, Andrew Butler.

‘What we are saying is that IT organisations adopting blades need to be prepared for further changes in this technology.

‘Blade servers have been a rapidly changing technology, and we fully expect this to continue, particularly during the next five years.’

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The number of people participating in online social networking is booming, a report has found.

There are currently 9.6 million people in the UK who belong to a social networking site and that number is forecast to nearly treble in the next five years, the report by Datamonitor revealed.

Although driven by the younger age groups, many older generations have now begun to be drawn in.

A report by Hitwise/Experian Integrated Marketing found that the role of social networks would be bigger than ever in 2008. It said that no business or government could afford to ignore the role these sites played in people’s lives.

Datamonitor’s consumer markets analyst and author of the report Matthew Taylor said: ‘Consumers are creating and joining existing social communities which, if harnessed correctly, can be an important marketing tool.’

The UK has the highest social networking membership in Europe and has been quick to embrace the technology. According to the report many start-up networks are only available in the English language.

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