With Fujitsu Siemens' server sales up nearly 30 per cent in the first quarter, the company says it is maturing and expects to capture more market share.

In the most recent Gartner server market survey Fujitsu Siemens took the number five position, showing the best growth in shipments of the leading five server makers, up almost 30 percent over last year. The company also now has a 2.3 percent market share by shipments, compared with 1.9 percent last year, replacing NEC, which was the number five maker in Gartner's 2002 rankings.

Fujitsu Siemens is Sun Microsystems only strong rival for SPARC-chip specific server business. The Gartner Q1 stats saw Sun Microsystems slide 13 per cent in shipments and a near 1.5 point slip in market share from a year ago to 4.9 percent.

"We are a different operation now," said Mike Oxby, head of large enterprise sales finance for Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, who was in Dublin on Wednesday to brief local businesses on server consolidation. "We are not just knocking out the tin, we've matured... just as we have developed leading technology, we are developing our services and financial products, and customers are beginning to see that," he said.

Oxby argued that Fujitsu-Siemens' move into the top five rankings has come about partly thanks to its new financial products, such as its "Migration Plan," which gives customers the ability to sell old servers back to Fujitsu-Siemens as a way to reduce the write-off that is associated with upgrading. Indeed, the company is hawking a slew of payment products to ease the cost of buying more powerful computers -- products that Oxby admits competitors have had for years but Fujitsu-Siemens has only introduced within the last year.

"We understand that it's a different environment now and our customers need different, more flexible, options," he said, adding that as the company introduces more payment products, market share would likely go up by a few points. © ENN