Huawei has confirmed that it will build its public cloud in South Africa to provide cloud services to all sub-Saharan African countries.
The company will hold a launch ceremony on 14 November in Cape Town for its first African station in Johannesburg.
Huawei believes cloud services are essential for digitization of economies. Huawei Cloud is committed to providing open, flexible, easy-to-use and secure cloud services, laying a solid foundation for a fully connected, intelligent world by bringing digital to every person, home and organisation.
Since it was established in March 2017, the Huawei Cloud Business Unit (BU) has unveiled more than 120 cloud services in 18 major categories. These cover more than 60 general solutions including SAP, high-performance computing (HPC), Internet of Things (IoT), security, DevOps and more than 80 industry scenario solutions; covering manufacturing, e-commerce, gaming, finance and Internet of Vehicles (IoV).
In 2018, Huawei Cloud officially launched the Hong Kong, Russia and Thailand Stations. By end September 2018, Huawei Cloud had provided services in Asia Pacific and partner public cloud services in Europe and Latin America, outside of the Chinese market. Huawei Cloud and Huawei partner public cloud are available in 14 countries and regions, and will be available in most of major the regions around the world by end of 2018.
Deng Tao, vice-president of Huawei Cloud BU says Huawei Cloud has been globalised since its inception because Huawei had been providing its products and technologies in the form of cloud services to partners like Deutsche Telekom (Germany), Orange (France), Telefonica (Spain) and China Telecom.
“Based on Huawei’s 30 years of ICT infrastructure experience and nearly 10 years of continuous R&D in cloud computing technologies, Huawei Cloud can provide a one-stop solution to large enterprises; addressing their challenges in digital and cloud transformation, as well as to small and medium-sized companies that aim to expand their business,” Deng says.
Last month, Huawei launched its comprehensive artificial intelligence (AI) strategy and full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio which is designed to provide powerful support for Huawei Cloud EI (enterprise intelligence), an AI service platform for enterprises and governments, was released in September 2017.
To turn AI into a practical reality, Huawei come up with the concept of EI. The company believes that a cloud will prosper only when it helps customers create value on an ongoing basis.
Talking about how to combine industry insight with AI, Jia Yongli; GM of the EI product department of Huawei Cloud BU, says: “Huawei Cloud EI is a scenarios-based service. Huawei Cloud EI drives industry modernisation in three scenarios, including repetitive and high-volume work, tasks that require expert experience and work that needs multi-domain collaboration. These will help improve efficiency, pass on expertise, and break the limits of human intelligence.”
On April 17, 2018, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the world’s top open source community in cloud technology, officially announced Huawei election to the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), making Huawei the first Asian company to be admitted into the CNCF TOC. In May, HUAWEI CLOUD became an SAP-certified platform for deploying SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver.
Huawei predicts that there will be five major cloud platforms in the world and promised that it would be one of those five. Huawei Cloud is positioned to be an open, co-operative, mutually-beneficial and customer-centric ecosystem that creates values.