Huawei wants to play a leading role as industry cloud enabler, the Chinese ICT vendor revealed at Huawei Connect 2016.
Best known as a telecommunications equipment vendor and handset manufacturer, Huawei revealed a new strategy that places the cloud, or more specifically the industry cloud, at the heart of the company’s future, during its global conference, Huawei Connect 2016. Under the theme “Shape the cloud”, the event will be gathering 20,000 people from the industry in Shanghai in the next three days.
Ken Hu, Huawei’s Rotating CEO, explained that Huawei’s strategy is about enabling an intelligent world with pervasive cloud technology. “Huawei has been dedicated to build devices, pipes and cloud. Cloud is going to have an important impact on society, far beyond technology itself, including business models and people’s mindset,” he said. Companies like Amazon or Tencent, Cloud 1.0 companies or born-in-the-cloud companies, as he described them, have introduced a cloud architecture and a cloud mindset, bringing about disruptive business models and new business value. The time has now come for Cloud 2.0 companies, or grow-with-the-cloud companies. “Now all industries are moving to learn how to use cloud technology. All of these enterprises are going to move their business to the cloud. Industry clouds will be emerging. By 2025 all enterprises will use cloud and 85 percent of enterprise apps will be in the cloud, said Hu.
Yan Lida, president enterprise business group at Huawei, said during a following keynote: “We will be reinventing business with industry clouds. In the cloud 2.0 era … the focus is no longer on cost reduction but on how to maximize bigger value.”
Huawei wants to contribute to the cloud ecosystem through openness via open-source technology, collaboration and shared success. Because Huawei expects countless industry clouds to be built in the coming years, there will be ample room for a variety of players in the cloud ecosystem, according to Hu. “We will be actively involved in industrial alliances and partnerships, including with Accenture, SAP, Intel and the telecom operators, creating synergies that will benefit our customers,” he said. Behind these actions lie two key elements, he explained. “The cloud ecosystem must be built around customer needs. Every organization in the ecosystem must have their own unique value. Huawei’s unique value is to leverage technology to create business value.”
Not a shift in strategy
But no, Huawei is not planning to become a cloud provider. The company wants instead to become a preferred partner that enables digital and cloud transformation. “Huawei wants to stay customer-centric, focus on ICT infrastructure and provide technology to become our customers’ preferred partner”, said Hu. Also present at Huawei Connect 2016 were a number of Huawei’s cloud partners, including SAP, Accenture, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica and GE.
Answering a question at a press conference later on, Ken Hu said Huawei’s cloud strategy was consistent with the company’s existing strategy. “Our strategy remains unchanged. It is just a fine-tuning of our strategy,” he said, explaining that Huawei was taking action in the cloud space because it had identified opportunities.
