Kathy Gibson reports from Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai – Huawei Enterprise Group has set a short-term goal of being a $10-billion IT organisation by 2019 – but doesn’t consider this a very ambitious target.
Yan Lida, presidentof the Huawei enterprise business group, told a media roundtable that Huawei Enterprise still considers itself a relatively small player in the IT market.
“$10-billion is still a small figure in the IT industry, where there are lot of players with revenues in the 10s of billions of dollars,” he says. “So our target is not actually very aggressive.”
Having said that, he adds that Huawei has invested a lot of money and resources in its products and solutions, to the extent that it believes the company currently provides the best integrated could as an industry solution.
Huawei Enterprise is currently targeting a small number of specific vertical markets for its industry cloud, Lida adds.
The major verticals are financial, government, energy and transportation. On a lesser scale, the company is also focussing on Internet, utilities and media companies.
Partnering is key to Huawei’s cloud strategy, as is the development of new skilled resources.
“We are looking to better collaborate with the solution providers within industry verticals,” Lida says.
The company has also opened an innovation lab in China and an industry solution innovation centres in Germany.
Cloud services will be rolled out internationally through partners, and Huawei plans to collaborate with local telecommunication providers to offer its cloud services. The company has signed its first cloud agreement with Deutsche Telecom and its IT division T-Systems.
“The collaboration wth Deutsche Telecom is important because we want to ensure that we succeed with our products and services before we roll them out in the region,” says Lida.
Looking forward, he believes the future for cloud services is promising, despite the economic downturn. “We are holding a positive attitude as we see companies in various industries are still willing to invest in ICT.
“We believe we can help them to upgrade and transform their businesses through digital transformation. Many of these companies have come to see ICT as less of an office or support systems, but as a core production system.”