Multinational ICT firm Huawei plans to develop 15 new OpenLabs as part of a three-year investment plan.

Making the announcement at CeBIT 2017 in Hannover, Germany, the ICT solutions company and its partners, including SAP, Infosys, T-Systems, said the OpenLabs are positioned to support collaboration to create solutions that enable digital transformation.

"These OpenLabs are facilitating joint innovation and solution launches with more than 400 partners across Smart City, finance, transportation, energy, manufacturing and media sectors," said Huawei.

The company has built and operated OpenLabs in 5 cities including Suzhou, Munich, Mexico City, Singapore, and Dubai.

In 2017, the plan is to construct 7 new OpenLabs located in cities including London, Paris, Moscow and Johannesburg, with the intention to establish 20 by the end of 2019.

Huawei has committed 1000 talents internationally and has confirmed an investment of US$200 million into the Program.

Victor Yu, President of Industry Marketing & Solution Department of Huawei Enterprise Business Group, said: "Each OpenLab addresses the needs of its local market, and harnesses local talent and technology assets. For example in Munich, Germany, we are working on joint innovation projects, conducting simulation tests and researching on connected cars with German automotive enterprises. We work with outstanding local companies to integrate their capabilities into Huawei's global value chain and promote these capabilities across the world, helping to enhance the competitiveness of local ICT industries."

Collaboration

Huawei emphasised its work with various solution partners to roll out technology. This includes work done with Accenture to develop smart city solutions, with Altair to create an enterprise simulation cloud solution aimed at the automotive industry, as well as with SAP and Oracle on power IoT solutions.

"Challenges within a future smart society cannot be tackled alone, they demand cooperation within the ICT industry and with relevant partners," added Yu.

Rolf Schumann, SVP Global General Manager Platform and Innovation, SAP Cloud Platform, said: "Since 2012, SAP and Huawei have established a strategic alliance, which is based on our complementary software and hardware, and we have cooperated to develop SAP HANA joint solutions and go-to-market (G2M) strategies. SAP believes that these OpenLabs can accelerate cooperation with Huawei in various fields, including Industry 4.0, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Business-to-Business (B2B) cloud."

Infosys has set up an alliance with Huawei since 2014. Umashankar Lakshmipathy, Senior Vice President and Regional Head – EMEA, Cloud & Infrastructure Services, Infosys Limited, said: "We have cooperated extensively with Huawei in finance, the IoT and cloud data centre solutions, and go-to-market (G2M) strategies."

Anette Bronder, Director Digital Division, T-Systems International, added, "IoT is the hot topic, but what would IoT be without a network and cloud? It was the right decision to step into the public cloud market, digitalisation is a global play and you can only be successful if you win with partners, it is not a single event but a journey. The public cloud business is a growth area ... we want to give a European answer with an Asian partner, we said keep it simple, affordable and secure and we started our success journey with Huawei."