Huawei Cloud South Africa believes that public cloud will develop into the strongest channel for value and that South African resellers stand to gain a lot more amid an increase in cloud migration and uptake of relevant services.

The Chinese multinational ICT and telecommunications firm, alongside its distribution partner Pinnacle Cloud, hosted a reseller partner event this week in Muldersdrift near Johannesburg to underline its value proposition.

Huawei distributor Pinnacle handles several product lines including enterprise, consumer and cloud. Both companies believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to integrate into solutions going forward and both have identified application of AI and data analytics within cloud strategies as a significant opportunity.

Huawei’s value proposition is to support resellers to empower their customers via an open cloud ecosystem that covers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – with a strong emphasis on the IaaS layers.

It is focused on IaaS, which the company defines as the expansion of global datacentres and networks “for a seamless and accessible experience for customers.”

It service portfolio covers several facets of cloud service, cloud migration, solutions and application, including: compute, storage, network, application, management and deployment, database, enterprise intelligence, enterprise applications, security, migration, and dedicated cloud, among others.

In April 2021 ITWeb reported that Huawei’s cloud business attracted 1 000 partner organisations in Africa. It has four datacentres in South Africa, which the company says is its most important market in Africa.

Jay Zhou, Managing Director, Huawei Cloud South Africa.

Jay Zhou, Managing Director, Huawei Cloud South Africa, said the company is committed to roll out solutions that enable business, but also speak to the needs of communities – particularly when it comes to security (CCTV), e-learning and healthcare.

It has also positioned its cloud offering to address market requirements for enhanced IT security, data control & protection.

Huawei supplies technology to several markets including: automotive, smart campus, e-commerce, education, financial omni-channel, healthcare and life sciences, gaming as well as manufacturing digital transformation.

Digital transformation at the cloud

Zhou said cloud investment is really where digital transformation is happening and predicts the public cloud will play a stronger role going forward. He said while hybrid is gaining popularity in the market because of the ability to control, secure and store sensitive data, the public cloud is where businesses will innovate, especially in terms of AI and data.

While he acknowledged that Huawei Cloud is a newcomer to the cloud services market, with the likes of AWS and Azure having already begun to tap into that space, he is confident of the company’s ability to catch up.

“So this is really challenging, but we think cloud is the future,” said Zhou.

He pointed out several benefits including cost because cloud usage can be optimised, there are more services available via cloud, flexibility and access to an on-demand resource.

According to Zhou Huawei has amassed over 20 years of experience in security and data protection, and uses this experience to refine its solution and platform offering.

“Huawei Cloud may be small, but we have the confidence to grow bigger,” he added.

He emphasised the importance of connectivity and bandwidth to cloud service rollout and adoption.

Every year, a third of the company’s global revenue is directed towards R&D in the cloud.

This investment has helped the company achieve second place in terms of market share in the cloud space in China, globally it is in the top five.

In terms of layout and footprint, Huawei has datacentres everywhere, except the US and Australia.