Kathy Gibson reports from Huawei Network Congress in Beijing – Improvements in networking will bring about the new Industrial Revolution as IT and industry become more deeply integrated.
In the past 10 years, Internet, mobile and social media has significantly changed industries in China – but there is still work to be done.
“In the past changes have happened in information flow and mainly in the services industry – but there have been few changes in the physical world, with technology not touching the industries.
“I believe that a real revolution will happen in the next decade,” Lida says.
The biggest three economies in the world have plans for the new Industrial Revolution. “Why these economies have announced similar plans at the same time is because there are infinite possibilities now.
“These include cloud, big data, social, IoT, CPS and mobility,” Lida adds.
CPS – or cyber physical systems – can also be referred to as the industrial Internet, he says. “When the IT system is deeply converged with IT, the target for connectivity will be different.
“This will offer more benefits, but also add more challenges to the network, where latency and capacity will have to improve dramatically.
Lida believes that, in the future, companies will have two IT systems: one with be the data system and the other a cloud system allowing them to make quick decisions.
Huawei today launched its Business-Driven ICT Infrastructure (BDII), which focuses on converging the business requirements with its industrial applications.
“We need to engage our customer from beginning to end,” says Lida. “Huawei will focus on the ICT infrastructure, forming an eco-system with our partners.”
In this eco-system Huawei will focus on a convergent ICT architecture across the cloud, pipe and device.
In the future, the IoT will drive 100s of millions of device connections requiring fast connections. LiteOS addresses this element.
In terms of the pipe, Huawei already provides low-latency high-concurrency and agile networks.
In the cloud, Huawei has announced its software-defined, hardware reconfiguration data centre.
BDII needs to be open and allow for co-innovation of the eco-system, Lida says. Huawei has built up a network of partners across the world in smart city, Industrie 4.0, eLTE, Agile Network and FusionSphere.
The company has also committed to developing open standards and is collaborating on standards for IoT chips, access and networking, M2M platform and applications.
“The new Industrial Revolution is unfolding, and Huawei is ready to work on co-innovation to embrace the new era,” Lida adds.