Huawei centres 2019 SA strategy on partnerships, collaboration

3rd May 2019

By: Natasha Odendaal

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

     

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As global information and communication technology (ICT) solutions provider Huawei Enterprise pursues new technologies and platforms, new emerging ICTs present an opportunity to build a new ecosystem, a cornerstone of industrial digitalisation and a fully connected digital world.

In line with this, the company, which aims to accelerate digitalisation and escalate the convergence of the physical and digital worlds as one platform, is implementing a strategy centred on partnerships and collaborations to bring this vision to fruition in South Africa.

“Huawei Enterprise South Africa’s strategy for 2019 will centre on collaboration with partners and customers in order to develop innovative and leading industry- specific solutions that will enable flexible, open and secure platforms to drive enterprise digital transformation,” says Huawei Enterprise MD Alex Du Min.

Speaking at the yearly Huawei Eco Connect, he said that Huawei was focused on facilitating a digital transformation ecosystem within South Africa in order to implement joint innovations and expand this ecosystem in terms of industry alliances, business alliances, developer platforms and open-source communities.

“The idea is that Huawei will provide the data centre facility, hardware and software infrastructure and the technical team, while the partner contributes ideas, products and human resources.”

“Huawei Enterprise can enable new ideas to be cultivated at a much faster pace and can allow for more agile industry innovation with a more efficient proof of concepts creation,” continues Du Min.

Digital transformation is gaining momentum, he says, highlighting that 42% of CEOs are now focused on ‘digital first’ or “digital to the core”, while 61% of CEOs plan to increase information technology (IT) investment in 2019.

This indicates a significant opportunity to move the industry forward as digital transformation, and the start of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, dominates boardroom agendas.

However, digital transformation is not easy to deploy and still has a long way to go, with businesses faced with radical viewpoints and demands for which CIOs, chief technology officers and chief digital officers are struggling to define cohesive digital strategies.

“It is therefore crucial that Huawei Enterprise commits to building a sustainable platform within which all its partners can thrive,” Du Min adds.

“Many underestimate the pace of digital transformation,” says International Data Corporation Middle East, Africa and Turkey research associate VP Ranjit Rajan.

“The digital economy is at a tipping point, whereby at least 60% . . . of global gross domestic product will be digitised [by 2020], with growth, driven by digitally- enhanced offerings, operations and relationships leading to and driving $7.5-trillion in IT-related spending from 2018 to 2022.”

There have been tremendous advances in technology over the last few decades, with the emergence of a whole set of innovations over the past three to four years leading the path into an era of multiplied innovations, he says.

By 2022, nearly 40% of core IT spending will be cloud related, rising to 80% by 2028, while, by 2021, 70% of new enterprise applications will be developed “cloud native” on a hyperagile architecture.

By 2020, 75% of enterprises using public cloud will also use an enterprise private cloud platform, and, by 2024, 90% of the global 1 000 organisations will have a multicloud management strategy that includes integrated tools across public and private cloud.

By 2022, he says, cloud applications will explode, with over one-million apps and services available.

Further, by 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) will create 180 ZB of data and 250 000 unique IoT apps and services, with 70% of organisations leveraging commercial IoT platforms to develop and deploy IoT applications. More than 50% of these organisations will have multivendor IoT platform environments.

By 2022, 50% of the initial analysis of IoT data will occur at the Edge, and, by 2025, 80-billion devices will be online worldwide.

In addition, he explains that fifth-generation technology will be transformative for IoT, giving rise to several new use cases, including intelligent transport systems, fleet management and autonomous vehicles, smart cities, remote robotic surgery, factory automation and augmented reality.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will become pervasive in the enterprise: by 2020, all effective IoT efforts will include some form of AI and machine learning and, by 2021, 30% of enterprises will exploit AI and advanced customer analytics to suggest innovative customer experience actions that will deliver value from a segment, persona or individual customer perspective.

Compelled to curtail IT spending, improve enterprise IT agility and accelerate innovation, 70% of CIOs will also aggressively apply data and AI to IT operations, tools and processes.

By 2022, 30% of enterprises will use conversational speech technology for customers and, by 2023, 35% of workers will start working with bots or other forms of AI, requiring company leaders to redesign operational processes, performance metrics and recruitment strategies.

“Huawei Enterprise will continue to strengthen relationships with our partners in South Africa and fiercely support and enable them to achieve the best results for their businesses by equipping them with the latest technological advancements in this market,” Du Min says.

He adds that convergence of operational technology, or OT, and IT will bring the physical world to digital, which would require one platform for data, technology, collaboration and communication.

“We are pushing very hard on the digital platform strategy, extending the strategy, we are consolidating the platform strategy, and make it very clear that one digital platform is the future foundation of the digital world,” he says.

In line with the Huawei Enterprise Platform + Ecosystem strategy, Huawei Enterprise will, in 2019, specifically focus on four strategic products and solutions.

These include the Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, which is a high-end product for the enterprise business market and the Huawei Wi-Fi 6 access point, which is the industry's first application of 8 × 8 multi- user, multiple-input and multiple-output, or MU-MIMO, orthogonal frequency division multiple access, or OFDMA, and 1024-state quadrature amplitude modulation, or 1024 QAM.

It is also the industry’s first wireless access point with a data transfer speed of up to 10 Gb/s.

Another focus is the industry’s first data centre switch built for the AI era – the CloudEngine 16800, embedded with an AI chip and using the innovative iLossless algorithm to achieve an AI computing power of 100%, improving data storage input/output operations per second by 30%.

Lastly, Huawei’s software-defined cameras can be applied in a wide variety of security scenarios, such as face checkpoint, situation awareness, vehicle checkpoint and intelligent transportation surveillance.

These will support the continuous evolution and development of algorithms and applications, with the open-ended platform enabling AI to be applied in more security scenarios.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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