Huawei talks up cloud efforts at Shanghai announcement fest

There’s nothing Huawei likes more than a great, big corporate event and at Huawei Connect 2017 in Shanghai it made a bunch of cloud-related announcements.

The stated theme of the event is ‘grow with the cloud’ and seems to be a prolonged exercise in bigging-up Huawei’s cloud strategy. The opening keynote exploring this theme was delivered by Rotating CEO Guo Ping, in which he sought to assure the assembled partners and customers what a great job Huawei is doing in the whole cloudy area.

“The cloud is a cornerstone of the intelligent world,” said Ping. “Society is experiencing a tangible Matthew effect in digital technology development. Because of this, as well as economies of scale in investment, clouds around the world will begin to converge – becoming more and more centralized. In the future, we predict there will be five major clouds in the world. Huawei will work with our partners to build one of those five clouds, and we’ve got the technology and know-how to do it.”

What the hell is a Matthew effect, we hear you ask. Well Telecoms.com copies-and-pastes into Google so you don’t have to, dear reader. According to Wikipedia it’s the phenomenon of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, but we assume he’s referring more to some kind of snowball effect in the growth of the digital economy, or something. Light Reading was at the event and was able to shed a bit more light (see what I did there?) on what Ping was trying to say.

There followed lots of talk of partnership and general cloud camaraderie. Huawei has signed an agreement with Microsoft to distribute its apps via the Huawei cloud and there was time given its ‘Platform + Connection + Ecosystem’ enterprise IoT strategy and to the continued efforts of the telco industry to digitally transform itself.

“To succeed in B2B, carriers must first transform their business model from helping enterprise customers own assets to offering them services, and from one-off resale to delivering continuous services.” said Yue Kun, Marketing VP for Huawei’s Carrier BG. “Cloud will be the platform and portal for carrier B2B services. Via the cloud, carriers will be able to develop entirely new blue ocean markets in industry, government, and enterprises with services like IoT, video, communications, computing, and storage.”

Huawei has been banging on about the cloud all year. It has clearly decided that one of the best ways to help its operator customers with their digital transformation journey is to help them get up to speed on cloudy stuff. At the same time bolstering its own ICT credentials will help the company to hedge its bets and be in a strong position to exploit emerging tech megatrends such as IoT.

The announcement fest continued into day two of the event, with another raft of initiatives, strategies and partnerships, but we figured you’ve got the general gist by now.