X-bit labs: Is there a certain limit, a certain bar you decided you should reach before you expand your product line into completely new fields, such as mobile solutions, for instance?

Charles Liang: Well, besides growing our market share and enhancing our ability to offer excellent products and service to customers, we want to continue offering a wide array of selections featuring better quality and competitive pricing. That’s our vision for the next few years.

X-bit labs: How would you evaluate the Supermicro’s position in the market today? How would you compare your progress to what the other server manufacturers have to offer at this time?

Charles Liang: Overall we are enjoying a big percentage of market shares and exercising quite an influence on the industry. Speaking in terms of our sales volumes, I could say that compared with tier one companies, we are still smaller in scale, in the server product line. But we are a much faster growing company. Looking at the current growth rate we are experiencing right now in term of volume, I anticipate we’ll turn into one of the top key players in the market within the next few years.

X-bit labs: What do you think of the more consumer server solutions such as servers for digital home? Intel has been promoting the digital home concept for the past years very actively. The amount of valuable multimedia content within a digital home environment keeps growing. Are you going to offer any solutions targeted specifically for this application field which could provide reliable and secure storage of this data and easy access to it?

Charles Liang: We have a couple of engineers studying this area, but it is not our main focus. At this moment, our main focus at Supermicro is offering a wide array of high quality server building block solutions with a rich feature set.

X-bit labs: Supermicro is a server company, however, you do offer a few desktop mainboards.

Charles Liang: About 90% of the current company products are server solutions.  However, we intend to give our customers a broader choice, so we do offer a few desktop solutions to please our customers.

X-bit labs: The reason I asked, is because some users would like to bring the excellent networking features and connectivity offered by Supermicro server products into the workstation or high-end desktop environment. We have recently reviewed Supermicro PDSGE mainboard, which is exactly a product like that.

Charles Liang: Yes, we’re in fact quite proud of our motherboard products. Since our entire product lines are doing very well, we need to ramp up our production capacities.  In this regard, we’ve recently bought another new building in Silicon Valley to keep up with demand.