Huawei launches ‘Shape the Cloud’ strategy which all sounds very familiar

During the inaugural Huawei Connect event this week, the Chinese tech giant launched its latest assault on the world of enterprise IT, but it is difficult to see what the difference is.

The ‘Shape the Cloud’ strategy was presented by Rotating CEO Ken Hu and represents Huawei’s efforts to move with the enterprise industry. Cloud computing as a concept has seemingly been around forever though we are only now getting to the stages where the cloud is penetrating the mainstream market in a meaningful manner. The ‘Shape the Cloud’ strategy represents this, though like cloud moving from the early adopter to mainstream markets, nothing much has changed except there’s a bigger pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

In all honesty, Hu or other executives at the top of the Huawei tree are not to blame. There have not been any significant breakthroughs in the cloud computing industry in the last twelve months, but all vendors need to be viewed as innovating. Hybrid cloud is now a major buzzword, as is Multi-cloud, though the concept of transforming a business  built on legacy technology to cloud is the same.

Huawei now has more customers to chase after, and of course retained customers to sell to once again. Little was said during the briefing which would demonstrate Huawei are taking a new approach, but its sales people need a new catch. ‘Shape the Cloud’ is a digital transformation piece with a shiny new paint job, now targeted at the mass market as opposed to early adopters.

The new strategy is supporting the overall acceptance of cloud. Hu described the first era of cloud computing as Cloud 1.0. This is the stage where the majority of the industry is too nervous to undertake new concept. The early adopters were born into cloud computing and built business models on an assumption of cloud computing.

Where we are now is Cloud 2.0, the stage where companies grow into the cloud. This is where the mainstream market plays a role, and where fortunes can be made for the tech giants who have made a name for themselves. The Huawei team expects 100% of companies to be in the cloud by 2025, as well 85% of the total workloads. This will be a substantial jump from where we are now, though technology adoption does have a habit of accelerating.

“We’re going to see tens of thousands of industry clouds in Cloud 2.0,” said Hu during a media briefing. “Behind those thousands of clouds, is the journey which those companies have to take. These transformation journeys are taking place now and also on the horizon. In the past, when the industry only had a limited number of public clouds, the cloud business model available to enterprise organisations was limited. Now with the broad horizons of the cloud in the 2.0 era, the business models will become far more diversified. This is where we see the opportunity in Cloud 2.0.”

In short, “Huawei aims to become a driver and enabler of the intelligent world” as Hu announced during the briefing, and generally it would be agreed his company is in a good position to do so. That said, in Shanghai’s Mercedes Benz Arena, Huawei put forward its ‘new’ strategy to capture the cloud newbies in a very energetic manner. The differences between previous strategies built around digital transformation, and ‘Shape the Cloud’ are murky, but Huawei’s ambitions to be recognised as the undisputed number one in the cloud industry are very clear.