Kathy Gibson reports from Huawei South African Connect in Sandton – Rain is a long-time telecommunications customer of Huawei, and a couple of years ago decided to move its business system to Huawei’s public cloud.
Leon Nortje, principal and senior architect at Rain SA, explains that the decision to invest in Huawei’s cloud was taken in 2024, at which time the telco migrated its OCS.
Until 2025, Rain continued to adopt a multi-cloud strategy but in 2025 came to the conclusion that AWS was a possible business risk.
“So we moved AWS out of the core infrastructure and migrated to Huawei Cloud DWS. This enabled us to use difference partnerships and gave faster data analytics with quicker response times.
“Then, in May 2026, we did the same thing with Google Apigee. After trialing Huawei’s solution, we switched over.”
Rain is currently trialing Huawei’s MaaS (model as a service), which will allow it to avoid lock-in by switching in an out of any model.
“We have tried several and found that we can switch without having to change our infrastructure,” Nortje says.
He adds that the migrations were accomplished quickly easily, and have already showed significant value.
Using the Huawei Cloud DWS has cut query times from three hours to about two minutes, with a cost reduction of about 50%.
“Although our big motivation was not so much cost, but to be more secure in case of political changes.”
A further benefit is the local data residency and a local support team, plus strong compliance, Nortje says.
Demonstrating how easy the migrations were, he says the move from Google Apigee to Huawei Cloud APIG was specified over the course of one weekend – by Nortje on his own. The actual migration then proceeded over a couple of weeks with little disruption.
The net result has been an 80% cost reduction, higher reliability and the assurance that comes from a local cloud service.
“Meanwhile the MaaS collaboration unlocks innovation, and the cost of the Huawei models is about one-tenth of the cost of other models.”
Other collaborations with Huawei include a joint roadmap that encompasses chatbots and token resales among other plans in the works.