Huawei pins growth on Cloud

By Nandita Singh

At the recently concluded, three-day Huawei Connect 2016 (Aug 31-Sep 2) in Shanghai, China, attended by global audience of over 20,000 industry leaders and 450+ journalists Huawei leaders, partners and customers took stock, and outlined vision and agenda, on how to promote digital transformation in industries and build a better connected world.

The company leadership emphasized that it will drive the ecosystem of devices, pipe (network) and the cloud to lead this “intelligence revolution” from the front and is actively involved in shaping the cloud, which is said to be the ever evolving, never ageing brain of the world.

“As industries integrate and consumer demands evolve, enterprises have to become more open and flexible, and future-proof their business. In the current cloud 2.0 era, all industries right from healthcare to education will become more interconnected and complex and (in this environment) marketplace advantages will come from within an organization, as has traditionally been the case, and also externally from the ecosystem in which they operate – forming a combination of both competitive and ecological advantages,” said Guo Ping, Rotating CEO of Huawei. He added that the ICT ecosystem will become more open, dynamic, and symbiotic. Every enterprise, big or small, can take part in this interdependent, symbiotic, and regenerative community of common interests, as long as it has its own unique value and makes its own unique contribution. This will lead to an era of broad alliances where influential, luminary companies and talent will emerge in great numbers. Guo branded these emerging companies as “heroes”.

Huawei Drives Cloud 2.0, Enables Heroes

Huawei uses SDN (Software Defined Networking) technology to shape the network architecture of the cloud era and to establish a firm foundation for the digital transformation of enterprises. The company’s new Agile Network 2016 focuses solutions on the mobilization of users and services during the digital transformation of enterprises, on IoT application of production systems, and on new challenges brought by cloud-based applications.

This new solution intends to create a network that is on-demand, has self-services, is easily managed, and is both secure and trusted. It uses cloud technology to simplify network management, while the software-defined networking (SDN) architecture better enables cloud intelligence. The Agile Network adheres to the concepts of ‘open, simple, and secure’, and is able to assist enterprises in achieving service innovation, service agility, and financial efficiency during digitization.

“For the Cloud, By the Cloud,” perfectly explains the proposition, said Shaowei Liu, President of Huawei Enterprise Network Product Line in his keynote explaining the offering. An IP technology expert Liu who has 19 patents to his credit said, “New business models brought about by cloud services are subverting traditional industries, and a intelligent cloud that provides services relies on a software-defined, open, simple, and secure network. This network is able to connect every part of an enterprise, every IoT system, and every mobile device. Cloud technology is also changing the efficiency of service deployment, management, and Operation and Maintenance (O&M) for traditional networks. Networks of the future should combine virtualization, automation, edge intelligence, cloud-based management, and security everywhere.”

The new Agile Network 2016 innovative solutions released include:

Cloud Campus: It uses cloud technology to achieve campus network planning, deployment, and O&M for the full lifecycle network cloud management. It enables provisioning of services within minutes. This is not only for serving small to medium-sized campuses, but also to innovatively launch the cloud management solution aimed at medium to large-sized campuses. Cloud management innovatively achieves the flexible switching between the local management and cloud-based management of network devices, allowing networks to smoothly evolve. Cloud Campus allows customers build enterprise-level cloud management platforms themselves.

Cloud VPN: Targeting the issue of increasingly high private line costs of enterprises, Huawei offers cost efficient Internet links with private line links using SD WAN technology, optimizing the application-based paths of multiple links, and allowing enterprises to make huge savings on the leasing of WAN links while maintaining the quality of services. With carriers’ urgent request for B2B service transformation in mind, this solution allows carriers to provide enterprises with self-service, menu-like, and high quality enterprise interconnection services, permitting customers to adjust bandwidth as needed, flexibly scale services, deploy new devices, and provision new services within minutes. It replaces expensive and complex network security products with simple and easy-to-use cloud-based security services for enterprises, also facilitating SMB enterprises in obtaining cost-effective protection.

Additionally, the Agile Network 2016 updates include a Cloud Fabric 5.0 solution with refined O&M, new practice for IoT in the elevator industry, and a ubiquitous virtualized security solution: Cloud Security.

Accelerating Migration to Cloud

Huawei released a series of innovative cloud solutions to help customers accelerate the migration of their apps to the cloud. These solutions comprise 31 cloud services which can be grouped into 10 categories (including those for computing, storage, network, security, data analysis, databases, testing and development, and management services). These services, along with Huawei’s previously released cloud services, constitute Huawei’s comprehensive IT IaaS framework.

To meet users' increasing storage demands, Huawei has launched FusionStorage 6.0, which supports distributed block, file, and object storage. This solution is designed to help customers address potential challenges arising from migration of their services to a cloud by providing the performance and capacity of a fully distributed architecture, flexible and optional infrastructure, and an open and compatible architecture.

Huawei's new FusionStage PaaS platform features an open architecture that offers enterprises a complete environment for app development, deployment, operation, and management. In addition, it provides a wide range of middleware services, including for Big Data and IoT as well as application components specific to different industries. The FusionStage supports mainstream development language and protocol. It also allows customers to deploy a new micro service in less than one minute.

Migration to Cloud is a Business Requirement    

In the last decade, cloud computing came to be viewed as a revolutionary technology driving the evolution of the IT industry. However, due to data sovereignty restrictions, difficulties in enterprise application migration and other reasons, less than 20% of enterprise applications are currently running on the cloud.

However, the coming decade will see enterprises rapidly migrating services to the cloud. This includes migration from non-critical services and standard applications to production systems and critical services. According to a custom research paper released by the consulting company, Forrester, “By 2025, more than 85% of enterprise apps will be run from the cloud.”

In terms of the cloud ecosystem, Huawei is dedicated to building more open platforms to allow for continuous contributions to open-source communities, like OpenStack, Hadoop, Spark, and Docker.

Zheng Yelai, President of IT Product Line at Huawei said, "Huawei is working with its partners and developers on cloud innovation to bridge today to tomorrow.”

According to Forrester research paper, most companies have been opting for a bolt-on digital strategy with just 25% of their respondents going after digital transformation. The study covered 212 business leaders from US, UK, Germany, Australia, India, Mexico and South Africa. “However, for an enterprise, shifting to the cloud is a process of value creation,” said Yelai.

In the coming decade, cloud services will quickly become default for technology teams around the world, with increasing use of public cloud services in support of core business capabilities.

Internet-based services differ considerably from traditional enterprise services. The demand for differentiated services creates the need for differentiated clouds. For Internet services, customers' apps have to adapt to a cloud, while for traditional services, a cloud must support customers' apps. “To enable Chinese enterprises to go global and foreign enterprises to enter the Chinese market, we need a global cloud and a platform, which calls for a unified API, architecture and ecosystem. Huawei, along with global carriers and other major partners, will build a cloud-based network for enterprises around the world to make optimal use of the cloud. Cloud-based technologies will enable enterprises to make more informed decisions and embrace automatic management, agile innovation, and an open ecosystem,” added Yelai. He comes with rich experience in OSS, wireless network optimization and network planning.

The company is already working on a telecom cloud with Germany’s Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica in the European market.

Business driven ICT infrastructure is the motto Huawei leaders follow emphasized, Ma Yue, the Vice President of Huawei Enterprise Business Group (EBG). “We are building the ecosystem with 30 strategic partners, 10 open labs and 10,000 overall partners 400 of whom are in the solutions space,” said Yue adding that flexible, technology architectures will dominate the post digital era. The many partner case studies presented, including Schindler, SAP,GE, Honeywell, HSBC and Indian IT major Infosys, at the conference showcased the same.

Also Read: Huawei, Infosys FusionCloud Solution Empowers Financial Institutions

Growing the Digital Transformation Pie

Huawei aims for just 1% of digital transformation pie, leaving the rest for its partners. Guo Ping, Rotating CEO of Huawei, in his keynote speech emphasized on three of Huawei’s guiding principles for cultivating a sound ecosystem in the cloud era:

1. Making a bigger pie (i.e., market) is more important than fighting for a larger share.
2. Managing cooperation is more important than managing competition.
3. Benefit sharing is the driving force behind the evolution of the ecosystem – and the result of its successful development.

Guo said that Huawei will unite as many people as it possibly can, grow the market, and share benefits more expansively and that the company has only set its sights on 1% of the huge digital transformation pie, leaving the rest to its partners.

During the conference, Ryan Ding, President of Products & Solutions at Huawei, went into greater detail on the company's Developer Enablement Plan. Huawei had announced the plan in 2015, with the aim of building a development enablement platform and a joint innovation platform for developers. The plan sets aside a total budget of US$1 billion that Huawei will invest over five years, aimed at rallying one million developers to Huawei's open platform by 2020. The company has already invested US$300 million in this plan, of which $200 million was spent on building an open enablement platform and $100 million on creating a global marketing platform.

(The author traveled to Shanghai at the invitation of Huawei Technologies)

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