20,000 ICT leaders gather to witness Huawei unveil the future

20,000 ICT industry professionals, thought leaders, and analysts poured into Shanghai this week to witness Huawei unveil a stream of innovations, including its vision of building one of five global clouds to power the future of business.

The New International Expo Centre was once again taken over by Huawei for its annual conference, Huawei Connect, in which thousands of representatives from more than 150 countries traveled to explore advancements in digital technology, and embark on a path to new growth.

With a commitment of spending USD500 million in the next five years to support digital transformations around the world, Huawei’s enterprise service strategy is focused towards positioning Huawei as an industry cloud enabler across diverse industries.

“Cloud is the most needed technology for governments and enterprises,” said Rotating CEO, Guo Ping, Huawei. “Huawei is very committed to building a cloud platform to support customer business needs and innovation. Our business model is not to monetize user data. We do not develop applications or touch the data in our public clouds. We provide technologies and services to help users monetize their data,” he added.

At the three-day event, Huawei launched “Connection+Cloud”, the dual drivers of its digitization strategy and enterprise network solutions for smart connection of everything. The strategy and solutions help enterprises accelerate their transformation to the cloud by providing comprehensive network connections, and network management that is more intelligent in all scenarios, such as access, WAN, data center, and interconnection.

The company also took the opportunity to release six new innovations into the market, discussing solutions designed to help enterprises with digital transformation. They included innovations in hardware, software, data, connection, architecture, and hybrid cloud.

The major focus was on the Huawei Cloud, which the company described as the cornerstone of the intelligent world. Huawei believes the development of technologies, societies are experiencing a tangible Matthew Effect when it comes to innovation. Because of this, clouds around the world will begin to converge, becoming more and more centralized.

The result will be a small collection of global clouds, powered by the biggest companies on the planet. Huawei has committed to developing one of those clouds with a number of partners.

“Increasingly, innovation will take place in the cloud,” said Joy Huang, Vice President of Huawei’s IT Product Line. “Huawei Cloud is committed to being an enabler of the intelligent world, delivering continuous innovations of technologies and capabilities that help customers succeed in their digital transformation.”

The Grow With the Cloud theme of the event focused on the practical implementation of Huawei’s cloud strategy, first unveiled at last year’s conference.

Rotating CEO, Ping, set the bar for enabling the intelligent world for customers all over the world, through his opening keynote. “Huawei has made strategic investments in the public cloud domain, and will provide long-term public cloud services,” he said. “I liken our strategy to a major airline alliance, such as SkyTeam or Oneworld. They take passengers wherever they need to go in the world. Huawei Cloud will open up the world to its users.”

Adding further weight to its commitment was the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for cloud services with Microsoft. The US tech giant will release Microsoft applications on the Huawei Cloud, providing optimal experience of cloud services for enterprises as they navigate through their digital transformations.

Huawei’s USD500 million, five-year commitment to enhancing service capabilities through its cloud transformation strategy will see enterprises embrace cloud transformation more and more.

Huawei also released the new-generation intelligent cloud hardware platform – Atlas. Positioned for scenarios such as public cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance computing (HPC), Atlas rides on the advantages of key technologies. The suite includes heterogeneous resource pooling and intelligent orchestration to deliver new levels of hardware resource utilization and adapt more flexibly to service demands. As the result of Huawei's Boundless Computing strategy, the Atlas platform makes Huawei well positioned to steer the infrastructure resource pool revolution.

Huawei enterprise network products and solutions have been widely used in more than 100 countries and regions around the world and are accelerating enterprises’ digital transformation based on Smart Connection of Everything. To date, 197 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, and 45 of the top 100 enterprises have chosen Huawei as their partner for digital transformation.

HUAWEI CONNECT 2017, Huawei's flagship event for the global ICT industry, is held at the Shanghai New International Exhibition Centre from September 5-7. The theme is Grow with the Cloud. Huawei will be exploring how to realize new growth through digital transformation together with its customers and partners at this global platform for open collaboration. For more information, please visit www.huawei.com\huaweiconnect2017