Barbara Schaedler

'We have the most extensive range of hardware of any manufacturer from PDA through laptop computers to servers and full systems,' says Vice President of Marketing and Communications Barbara Schaedler who is visiting the Gitex show in Dubai this week.

'The Fujitsu-Siemens joint venture is four years old, and is therefore quite a young company and yet we can supply the broadest range of servers and really contribute the full IT infrastructure'.

However, Ms. Schaedler agrees that it is not enough just to supply hardware and that increasingly important to look at client's needs in a more integrated way.

'In Europe we now have many clients with older systems and one thing that we do is to focus on the return on investment. Often we can show that a new system will pay for itself quickly because an older one requires too much spending on services'.

For many potential clients FJC scores highly for German-built quality and reliability, and that takes a second place to cost. AME Info, for example, has its entire office suite from PDA to servers from this one supplier.

'But price has become an issue in many cases,' says Ms. Schaedler who worked for eight years in the press department of the German Federal Foreign Ministry before moving into private enterprise. 'This is partly because of the low rate of economic growth in France, Germany and the UK, which has slowed the pace of IT investment and made people very cost conscious.

'We have to face a new customer paradigm, and that is focusing clearly on what is the customer requirement. It did not used to be the main priority but today customer-centric solutions are the top priority.'

Visitors to Gitex this week can get a sneak preview of the more extensive display that will greet top regional clients when they arrive in Augsburg later this month. And the entire product range remains strongly-constructed, stylish and upmarket.

This has made Fujitsu-Siemens the fastest growing brand in the regional market with 35% growth last year partly because its 'mobility strategy' well in tune with the shift towards mobile computing technology.

'The Middle East market will keep on growing, we are confident of that,' says Ms. Schaedler whose new offices were inaugurated in Dubai by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder two weeks ago.