As CES winds down, interest in Windows Home Server remains strong. Despite this being one of the last days of the show, it was still extremely busy and tons of people were on the search for the Windows Home Server booth. Windows Home Server Marketing Manager Nicole Berett shared with us some of the great stories the team heard at the booth today. Nicole said they had many customers talk about how they were using Windows Home Server in their small office/home office (SOHO).  One story that stood out in particular was a couple who owned a small IT consulting business in Wenatchee, Wash. and used Windows Home Server to connect to all of their customers and data. They recommend to all of their customers that they should use Windows Home Server in their homes as their “safe” for their digital content. Nicole said: “One thing that I thought was impressive was that this business also used Windows Home Server to back up their Microsoft Windows Small Business Server, which they use to run their company.”

These kind of SOHO stories also reinforce what we heard in our 2009 user survey; we saw the number of home-based businesses using Windows Home Server nearly triple in the last year. This week’s announcement from LaCie with its network storage server for small business based on the Windows Home Server platform, as well as HP’s new StorageWorks X500 Data Vault, are the first specific Windows Home Server based offerings targeting SOHO. It’s exciting to see the home server category and Windows Home Server quickly propelling into the SOHO market.