Huawei Internet services unit grows as more firms adopt cloud
Africa
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29 Mar 2021
Huawei says it has seen significant growth in its global Internet Service Industry division, with the Chinese multinational telecoms giant servicing more than 2 300 customers in the past year.
Speaking last week at the virtual 2021 Huawei Industrial Digital Transformation Conference, Hongbo Li, president of global Internet Service Industry division at Huawei, provided an update on its performance in the past year.
Huawei’s Global Internet Service Industry unit provides solutions and services to Internet service providers, multi-tenant data centre service providers, managed service providers (MSPs) and Internet content providers across the globe.
Li noted the telco saw global network traffic grow by 35%, which was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as more enterprises chose to deploy applications in the cloud.
Emerging technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality are generating unprecedented digital growth, leading the Internet industry to develop all-optical connectivity, adopt multi-cloud architecture in data centres, and turn to diversified and intelligent Internet services to meet their growth targets, he explained.
“Huawei has serviced more than 2 300 customers in the Internet Service Industry, including 1 460 ISP customers, 500 MSPs and MTDs, and 320 over-the-top (OTT) customers.
“The pandemic has changed behaviour and accelerated the digital transformation progress across consumer and business sectors. Around 85% of applications will be on cloud by 2025. The time spent on online services also increased by 38% last year. In 2020, we also cooperated with 1 200 partners, launched four scenario solutions and released a white paper of the Internet service industry to gain a deeper understanding into the industry.”
Sharing some of the insights from the white paper, titled: “Technical White Paper on Infrastructure for the Internet Service Industry”, Li outlined three key Internet trends: increasing Internet access, more enterprises choosing multi-cloud strategies and diversified OTT services.
“Customers are witnessing a new wave of transformation from the cable or copper to a fully optical network, which can guarantee a much greater experience for last mile access. A diverse range of new services are also emerging nowadays as a result of diversified OTT services, which provide mixed service to organisations.”
Li pointed out that data centre operators are looking to provide multi-cloud solutions to clients, to enable them to speed up the digital deployment processes and provide customers with cutting-edge solutions.
“The mixing of business models is also a trend – ISPs are leveraging their network strengths and are transforming into network operations plus managed service providers of various managed services, such as WiFi service or computer-location services and even cloud-focused managed services.”
Also speaking at the event, Ken Hu, Huawei's rotating chairman, pointed out digital transformation is speeding up across industries, and full cloud adoption will happen one to three years earlier than expected.
As new challenges and uncertainty emerge in the post-pandemic era, he noted Huawei will be more open and continue to work with its 30 000 global partners to complement each other's strengths and help overcome new challenges.
“So far, Huawei has built 13 Open Labs around the world to support joint innovation. In places like Munich and Dubai, the company is working with almost 900 ecosystem partners to incubate different solutions for industrial scenarios.
“To date, Huawei has successfully verified more than 60 solutions in areas ranging from smart retail to smart manufacturing. On the technology side, Huawei is innovating in areas like smart campuses, deterministic networks, hyper-integrated data centres, smart clouds and green energy to lay the foundation for an intelligent future,” said Hu.
Huawei noted it will keep innovating in technology and scenario-based solutions to help all industries take advantage of opportunities presented by emerging technologies.