Cloud computing is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for IT, but this necessitates a change not only in the way businesses are structured, but how they buy and deploy their IT assets as well. Kathy Gibson reports from Shanghai
Huawei commits to open partnering
Partnering is a key strategy for Huawei as it builds out its IT business to embrace public, private and hybrid cloud solutions.
Eric Xu, CEO of Huawei Technologies, stresses that the very nature of cloud computing and digital transformation means that one company cannot be all things to all people, and partnering is going to be key to success in the future.
“Cloud computing has put all IT companies on to the same starting line,” he points out. “At Huawei we had no legacy so were in a good position to take advantage of cloud.
“Huawei’s goal has always been to become a leader in ICT, which meant we had to become an IT company. But we had to focus, so we focused on server, storage and data centre networking.”
Rise of the industry-specific cloud
As cloud computing becomes more pervasive, industry-specific clouds will start up that cater to the specific needs of vertical markets.
In fact, the industry cloud market is set to accelerate in the next years, and could become a $1-trillion market in the not to distant future, says Lida Yan, president of the enterprise group at Huawei Technologies.
“In the last 10 years the internet has fundamentally reshaped the business landscape, particularly in the services market,” Yan says. “But I think the real revolution has yet to come, and we will see it in the next 10 years.”
Deutsche Telecom signs up Huawei for public cloud
Deutsche Telecom has signed up Huawei as its public cloud computing partner in Europe.
Jorn Kellerman, senior vice-president and T-Systems, explains that the company was looking for a simple, secure and affordable public cloud solution.
Deutsche Telecom is a leading player in the European IT and telecommunications services market, offering broadband access, backbone connectivity and, through T-System, IT services to a number of global clients.
Huawei Enterprise plans to hit $10bn by 2019
Huawei Enterprise Group has set a short-term goal of being a $10-billion IT organisation by 2019 – but doesn’t consider this a very ambitious target.
Yan Lida, president of the Huawei enterprise business group, told a media roundtable that Huawei Enterprise still considers itself a relatively small player in the IT market.
“$10-billion is still a small figure in the IT industry, where there are lot of players with revenues in the 10s of billions of dollars,” he says. “So our target is not actually very aggressive.”
Chips to get a lot more intelligent
The future of chips is not what it used to be – we are close to getting custom-designed reprogrammable chips that the will effectively drive whole systems.
Joerg Kerpinsky, sales director: Germany for Huawei Enterprise systems business, says these super intelligent chips will be available as soon as 2020 – and they will change the way the industry thinks about hardware.
He is quick to clarify that, while Huawei is keen to the these reprogrammable chips deployed, it isn’t alone in working on them.
“The whole community is putting a lot of thought into what chips will looks like in the future,” he says. “We believe that Huawei can have an influence on what they will look like, but we never intend to compete with our partners.
Sea change coming for storage
As cloud computing becomes more pervasive, storage is assuming a new importance, and new technologies will emerge to simplify the acquisition and management of enterprise storage.
Joerg Kerpinsky, sales director: Germany for Huawei Enterprise systems business, reveals that the industry is about to see major changes in storage tiering.
“As we go forward, storage management is going to become a lot easier,” he says. “There are also going to be big changes in the kind of storage devices that we use.”
These changes will happen as early as this year, he reveals.
Huawei debuts open cloud fabric
The network has become the bottleneck stifling the ability of cloud computing to scale effectively; but software-defined networking (SDN) could hold the key to unlocking performance and scale.
“SDN is becoming necessary because, as the cloud gets bigger, traditional networking cannot satisfy the requirements,” says Swift Liu, president of Huawei’s switch and enterprise communications solutions.
“More and more enterprises are moving into SDN because they want to get more value from their investment in networking and their data centres.
“We think SDN is the future trend because it can provide more power utilisation and other features that we cannot provide today. The whole industry is moving to cloud, and networking has to move as well.”