Kathy Gibson reports – Everything as a service: that’s the goal that Huawei Cloud is aiming for in a world where technology innovation is moving at an unprecedented pace.
Huawei built the first local cloud region in Johannesburg in 2019. Since then, it has signed up more than 1 000 local customers from government, financial services, transport, education and universities, says Jacqueline Shi, president of Huawei Cloud global marketing and sales service.
“Our cloud business in South Africa has increased more than 16-times over this period,” she adds.
Looking to the future, Huawei Cloud will focus in three areas:
- Continue to provide technology in the local region for comprehensive data, AI and media cloud solutions.
- To provide a strong local team to offer structure and support for South African customers.
- To build and train the local ecosystem by empowering South African partners.
Will Meng, CEO of Huawei Technologies South Africa, says the company aims to build on its 25 year history in the country.
“We are dedicated to driving south Africa’s digitalisation,” says Meng. “Our vision is to bring digital to every person, family and organisation. And to have a fully connected, intelligent world.”
While helping to build a digital South Africa, Huawei is also helping to contributed to green energy and skills transfer.
Cloud is central to this, he says: “No cloud, no digtalisation.”
Huawei Cloud is the fastest-growing cloud in South Africa, says Mark Chen, president: global solution sales at Huawei Cloud, with 110% year-on-years growth.
Reasons for this success include the focus on various different industry clouds, the shared ecosystem underpinning services and continuous innovation in conjunction with customers, Chen believes.
He adds that South Africa has recognised the benefits to be gained from cloud services, and is committed to driving a digital economy.
Huawei Cloud offers more than 100 cloud services via three AZs in South Africa, and guarantees a nationwide latency of just 15ms.
It offers 24/7 supports, and backs this up with more than 1 000 service engineers on the ground in South Africa.
During the Huawei Cloud Summit, Chen launched Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5 in South Africa, enabling a better hybrid cloud solution.
Huawei Cloud Stack brings together Data, AI and applications on top of the Cloud Foundation and is offered across nine industry-specific clouds.
Huawei’s AI offering is delivered via industry-specific Pangu models, with more than 300 use cases across more than 30 industries.
A number of Pangu models have been launched in South Africa: a model for weather forecasting, a AI video service for target detection, and RAG + LLM for knowledge management.
Underpinning the AI solutions are Huawei’s GaussDB distributed database management system, offering smart migration, high performance and intelligence.
With DataArts Studio and ModelArts, Huawei enables data-AI convergence to enhance insights from more data sources.