e shopping with RFPs and RFQs-a good indicator of later move- ment. To date the main applications that softswitch solutions have addressed are enterprise applications such as PBX management, IP Cen- trex, VoIP, and wireless LANs. The Server Market There is an evolution underway in the server market that is pulling the players away from the stand-alone server model in favor of a new design. The next evolutionary stage is called the blade server. A blade server is a complete server on a board that plugs into a common chassis and shares power, cooling, backplane cabling, and network access with other blades. It is designed to simplify the process of server management for IT staff and to reduce the cost of shared infrastructure. The second evolutionary stage is called a brick server. A brick server allows IT staff to interchange memory, processors, disks, and other ele- ments on an individual blade, a model that allows for highly modular plug-and-play capability. Several manufacturers are already going down the blade-to-brick path including IBM, Dell, HP, and Sun. The Content Providers This is what it's all about: Designing and building the content that cus- tomers will access from a wide array of both stationary and mobile devices. Consider these numbers: 98 percent of all American households have TV; 69.4 percent of them have cable. Furthermore, there are 187 national cable channels. Ninety-one percent of American households have VCRs, while a slightly smaller (but equally respectable) number have DVD players. And just to provide fuel for that entertainment fire, 500 feature films emerge each year on 37,000 screens. And it isn't just television and movies: According to consultancy IDC, U.S. wireless gam- ing alone will grow to $71.2 million in 2007. And that's just the wireless segment! The key content providers have well-known names: AOL Time- Warner, Google, Sony, Vivendi, Terra-Lycos, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. Their activities in the marketplace illustrate that they understand all too well that the key to success i