BUSINESS COMPUTING
SASIWIMON BOONRUANG
Asustek (Thailand) recently announced its own Asus brand of Intel Xeon-based energy-efficient servers targeting SMEs as primary potential customer group.
According to the company's country manager Pornthep Watchara-Amnuay, Asus servers have been available in the market for a few years but only as bare-bones products which were mainly assembled by computer shops.
This would be the first time that servers, complete with the CPU and hard disk, were offered under the Asus brand and marketed here with the after-sales service provided by Asus, he said.
The server market was different to that for consumer products since customers required reliable service, so Asustek had to make sure that its service facilities were ready, he said, adding that Asus had also hired a company to be responsible for onsite service.
The overall server market growth in Thailand was pretty still this year, with only 0.5 percent growth in 2007, Pornthep said, noting that having a server product would enable Asus to provide customers with a complete line of products. "Having all kinds of products enables us to more easily offer total solutions to customers who can deal with us as a single point of contact," he said.
Pornthep added that Asustek's major business was now notebooks and mainboards which generated 51 and 25 percent of revenues respectively.
Today Asus mainboards are the market leader worldwide and the company targets having a 50 percent market share this year and plans to be in the top five in notebooks over next three years.
Pornthep also pointed out that Asus was No.1 in netbooks and aimed to have a 50 percent market share in 2009.
The company expects to have some five percent market share of servers here by the fourth quarter of this year.
According to Thiravuth Rojanamarywong, Asustek (Thailand) account management manager, Asus "green design" servers featuring an energy-saving power supply were able to improve power efficiency and save 45 percent in power usage compared to other vendors.
Quiet fan control technology and proprietory I/O kit expansion (PIKE) that provides customers with multiple I/O solutions were the key strengths of Asus server technology, he said, noting that PIKE helped upgrade from SATA storage to SAS storage directly, supported various RAID functions without any other hardware upgrade.
The company introduced five green servers, starting at 33,500 baht and all are based on the Intel Xeon processor.
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