Category Archives: Huawei

China Telecom trains massive AI model using only Chinese-made chips

China Telecom, a state-owned carrier, has developed two LLMs that were entirely trained on domestically produced processors. This breakthrough demonstrates China’s progress toward chip independence, particularly in the field of AI. The company’s AI Institute announced that its open-source model, TeleChat2-115B, along with another undisclosed model, was trained on tens of thousands of Chinese chips.… Read more »

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Huawei Mobile Services partners with AVOW and Turismo Andalucía ‘to strengthen bonds’

HUAWEI Mobile Services (HMS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Council of Tourism, Culture, and Sports of the Andalusian Government (Turismo Andalucía) and marketing agency AVOW, aiming to advance mutual goals and capture business opportunities. The MOU signing ceremony took place at MWC 2024, held in Barcelona, Spain. Huawei was represented by Ning… Read more »

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Smartphones help Huawei to 40% revenue growth over H1

Huawei MWC 2016

Huawei has released financials for the first half of 2016 demonstrating a 40% revenue boost to $37 billion, partly owing to a healthy performance in the consumer business unit.

Although operating margin for the period has declined from 18% to 12%, the company posted stronger revenue growth for the period, slightly offsetting the decline. During the first six months of 2015 revenues grew 30%.

“We achieved steady growth across all three of our business groups, thanks to a well-balanced global presence and an unwavering focus on our pipe strategy,” said Sabrina Meng, Huawei’s CFO. “We are confident that Huawei will maintain its current momentum, and round out the full year in a positive financial position backed by sound ongoing operations.”

The decrease in the operating margin reflects the progress of the larger smartphone industry, as well as the competition which is increasing worldwide. Huawei currently sits in third place in global market share of the smartphone market, though it has been investing heavily to penetrate western markets in recent months. Samsung and Apple are currently defending their position as the top two, though Huawei’s efforts to chance the mid-range market are seemingly paying off.

Set against a backdrop of declining smartphone shipments, Huawei has held onto its strong position in the Chinese market, increasing its shipments from 11.2 million to 16.6 million in Q1 2016, compared to the same period in 2015. The move increased its market share from 10.2% to 15.8% taking it to the top of the Chinese leader board, while Apple lost ground dropping from 12.3% to 11%.

While this may be seen as unsurprising in some quarters of the industry, success in the international markets is becoming more apparent. According to research from Gartner, sales of smartphones to end users totalled 349 million units in the first quarter of 2016, a 3.9 percent increase over the same period in 2015. Samsung accounted for roughly 23% of the market, whereas Apple was just under 15%. Huawei increased its share 5.4% to 8.3%, taking it to third in the global market share tables. The company is expected to continue to ramp up its R&D focus over foreseeable future.

Although the company did not detail the enterprise business units figures though that is likely to be outlined in the coming weeks. The enterprise business, which includes cloud computing, storage, and SDN products, Safe City and Electric Power IoT solutions, did announce healthy growth of 44% to $4.5 billion during its annual Global Analyst Summit in April.

In the carrier business, the role of 5G and IoT was reaffirmed, and the team will be focusing on four areas within the telco industry, business, operations, architecture, and networks. While the carrier business has been demonstrating strong growth throughout the world, it has struggled in the US after its technology was effectively banned over concerns it would be used by Chinese authorities to spy on the US. While Huawei has continually denied the allegations, it has struggled to rebound and reassert itself in the market.

Elsewhere in the industry, competitor Ericsson has been experiencing slightly different fortunes after CEO Hans Vestberg resigned following another difficult quarter for the company. Last week, the company reported an 11% annual decline in net sales with pressure continuing to build against Vestberg.

SAP’s HANA launches on Huawei’s FusionSphere cloud platform

Huawei MWC 2016Huawei and SAP have announced the general availability of the SAP HANA platform on Huawei’s OpenStack cloud platform FusionSphere 5.1.

The announcement follows a long-standing partnership, dating back to 2012 when Huawei became a SAP global technology partner, which saw the team open a co-innovation centre at Huawei’s Shenzhen campus last year, which was tasked with advanced the teams capabilities in the cloud computing and big data market segments.

“SAP is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software, and SAP HANA is leading enterprise software innovation right now,” said Zhipeng Ren, President of the Huawei IT Cloud Computing Product Line. “Huawei’s FusionCloud solution support for SAP HANA is widely accepted in the market. With the open cloud computing strategy, Huawei builds a win-win cloud ecosystem through an open, enterprise-class cloud platform.

“Based on OpenStack open source architecture, Huawei FusionSphere has made thousands of enterprise-class enhancements, and is an ideal cloud infrastructure platform for SAP HANA and critical enterprise applications. In the meantime, our joint initiatives with SAP are intended to create more value for customers to achieve their goals.”

Over the course of the relationship, SAP’s HANA offering has been made available on a number of Huawei platforms including FusionCube, FusionServer RH2288H V2/V3, FusionServer RH5885H V3 and FusionServer RH8100 V3. Huawei claims that since FusionSphere can run business applications that have traditionally been run on premise, the platform will create a number of new opportunities for mass processing of big data on the cloud.

Huawei’s enterprise business unit grows 44% to $4.5 billion

Maintaining ProfitsHuawei’s Enterprise Business Group (EPG) has reported healthy growth over the last 12 months generating $4.5 billion over the period, an increase of 44% year-on-year.

Speaking at Huawei’s Global Analyst Summit 2016, the company highlighted growth was fuelled by customer demand for new ICT solutions, and outlined it strategy for 2016 under the tagline “Leading new ICT, building a better connected world”. The new proposition is focused around developing open, flexible and secure platforms for customers worldwide.

“In 2015, Huawei EBG experienced rapid growth in the public safety, finance, transportation, and energy sectors,” said David He, President of Marketing and Solution Sales at Huawei EBG. “With the development of innovative ICT including cloud computing, big data, Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT), customers’ business models, enterprises’ IT architectures, and industry ecosystems are changing profoundly. To address our customers’ challenges and strategic demands, Huawei works closely with our partners to develop joint innovations, through which we provide our clients with differentiated and leading products and solutions to help them thrive in the new ICT era.”

The announcement comes after Huawei launched its All-Cloud strategy at the event this week, as a means to capitalize on digital capitalization trends. Building on the ROADS experience model, All-Cloud centres on network modernization and aims to enable digital transformation within enterprise.

The enterprise group’s focus to date has been on the traditionally high-value contracts, though it is not clear what industries have been prioritized for the next 12 months. 76% of Huawei EBG’s 2015 sales revenue was generated from channels and partners, an increase of 47% year-over-year, owing to the fact that the company has now developed partnerships with more than 300 distributors and value-added partners, as well as more than 8000 tier-2 channel partners.

“In line with our ‘being integrated’ strategy, Huawei will continue to support our partners and help them succeed in the new ICT era by enhancing our products, brands, logistics, services, businesses, and IT systems,” said Raymond Lau, President of Global Partners and Alliances at Huawei EBG.

Huawei launches All-Cloud strategy

business cloud network worldHuawei has launched its All-Cloud strategy the Huawei Global Analyst Summit 2016, as a means to capitalize on digital capitalization trends.

The new strategy builds on the ROADS experience model – Real-time, On-demand, All-online, DIY, and Social – which was launch at the same event 12 months ago. While the ROADS framework focuses on delivering improved user experience, All-Cloud centres on network modernization and aims to enable digital transformation within enterprise. The new campaigns have been billed under the tagline of “Growing together through digitalization and building a better connected world”.

“Global digitalization is accelerating, and this is improving efficiency and user experience in many areas, including vertical industries, public services, and every aspect of our lives. Our Global Connectivity Index (GCI) 2016 reveals that global connectivity improved by 5% in 2015,” said Deputy Chairman of the Board Eric Xu. “We can work together in the areas of enhancing connectivity, enabling the digital transformation of vertical industries, improving the connectivity experience and expanding access under all scenarios, and to accelerate global digitalization.”

“In the All IP era, we proposed our Single strategy, which effectively supported the development of operator customers,” said Xu. “Nowadays, as we face the digital transformation of different industries, we advocate full cloudification to build efficient networks and agile competitiveness. Driven by end users’ needs for a better experience, Huawei proactively advocates the All Cloud strategy, promotes network modernization, and works to enable digital transformation across industries, thus meeting end user needs to enable customer success.”

The All-Cloud proposition is built on a data centre-centric architecture, with all network functions, services and applications will run in the cloud data centre. The company has claimed that through a unified and open architecture, it will be able to meet customers’ needs for business transformation on all cloud platforms, public, private, industry, and hybrid.

Within the company’s carrier business, the team plan of developing cloud-based IoT, video services, and service platforms, to win new business, but will also promote the cloudification of operations systems.

“Network Functions Virtualization standardizes and virtualizes equipment and hardware on ICT networks,” said Xu. “However, even with NFV, we still adopt a traditional method for managing the software architecture and operations model. If we can move another step forward and use the cloudification concept to make network software fully distributed and automated, we can realize Network Functions Cloudification (NFC).”

In the enterprise unit, cloud computing, SDN, and big data technologies will form the central pillars of marketing messages. The company has seemingly prioritized digital transformation as a means for enterprise to transform towards agile and smart operations.

On the company’s blog it highlighted that the transformation will take place over three stages. “First, Huawei will need to encourage enterprises to move their IT systems to the cloud to fully utilize resources and improve efficiency. Second, Huawei will accelerate the pace of transforming enterprise networks into SDN, and then use a unified SDN controller to centrally integrate telecom, enterprise, and DC networks and achieve agile operations throughout the entire process. Third, Huawei will enable smart enterprises with Big Data.”

Deutsche Telekom aims to increase European market share with Open Telekom Cloud launch

DTDeutsche Telekom has launched Open Telekom Cloud, a new public cloud platform with Huawei as the hardware and software solution provider, in an effort to increase its market share in the European public cloud segment.

The service will offer European enterprises on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud services via an OpenStack-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution operated by T-Systems. The company ambition is to accelerate its position in the market segment, which is currently dominated by US players.

“We are adding a new, transformational cloud offering to our existing portfolio of cloud services,” said Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges at CeBIT in Hanover. “For our business customers in Europe this is an important new service to support their digitization, and a critical milestone for us in our ambition to be the leading provider of cloud services in Europe.”

“More and more customers are discovering the advantages of the public cloud. But they want a European alternative,” said Anette Bronder, Head of the T-Systems Digital Division. The move aims to capitalize on recent industry concerns over where data is being stored, as European customers are increasingly demanding that their data remain within the boundaries of the EU.

Located in Biere, Saxony-Anhalt, any data will be subject to German data protection policy, recognized as one of the most stringent globally. “Access to a scalable, inexpensive public cloud provided by a German service provider from a German data centre under German law will be very attractive to many customers in Germany” said Andreas Zilch, SVP at analyst firm Pierre Audoin Consultants. “The combination of a competitive service and German legal security represents a unique selling point right now.”

Deutsche Telekom and its subsidiary T-Systems have been offering cloud solutions since 2005. The data centre in Biere, and its twin in Madgeburg, hosts almost all of the company’s ecosystem partners, which includes the likes of Microsoft, SAP, Cisco, Salesforce, VMWare, Huawei, Oracle, SugarCRM, and Informatica.

The announcement also strengthens Huawei’s position in the European market, a long-term ambition for the Chinese tech giant. Huawei will provide hardware and software solutions, including servers, storage, networking and Cloud OS, while also the technical support for the public cloud services.

“The strategic partnership allows each party to fully play to their strengths, providing enterprises and the industry with various innovative public cloud services that are beyond those provided by over-the-top content players,” said Huawei Rotating CEO Eric Xu “At Huawei, we are confident that, with esteemed partners like Deutsche Telekom, we can turn Open Telekom Cloud into the standard of public cloud services for the industry at large.”

 

Huawei unveils Cloud Data Center for operators at MWC 2016

Huawei MWC 2016Equipment maker Huawei has built a cloud data centre infrastructure vehicle for transporting operators into the cloud.

It unveiled the service as Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, on the same day that Amdocs and Red Hat announced they’d created a system to help mobile operators to throw off their fixed infrastructure shackles.

The Huawei Cloud Data Center is to be an open ecosystem with joint innovations from SAP, Accenture and a range of other partners. Cloud migration services will be provided by SAP, while Accenture will offer the development of enterprise-class private cloud applications.

At the launch of the new ‘application centric, cloud 3.0 data center’ Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei IT Product Lines, promised Huawei would combine mission-critical servers, storage consolidation, cloud fabric software defined networking, modular data centers and other IT concepts into a single, highly flexible cloud data center platform.

Telco carriers can now get a single simple system for resource management, elastic expansion, convergence and visualized operations and management, Yelai claimed. Huawei promised to harmonise each carrier’s services, operations, infrastructures and networks at Huawei’s data centers. The problem for most carriers is that they have data in different silos and business support systems and operating systems that cannot be fashioned, in their existing format, into a cohesive system, according to Yelai. This means that carriers will be unable to compete with new companies that can run their data services across any telco’s network, because they were invented in the age of the cloud. By hosting the carriers, Huawei’s Cloud Data Center can liberate the carriers, said Yelai.

The cloud, Yelai said, could smash the silo-like structure of conventional IT and empower carriers with more choices in their cloud transformations. With their revitalized deployment strategies, telcos become strategically positioned as enablers of the digital economy, claimed Yelai.

Huawei’s Cloud Data Center will be a strong advocator of open standards in cloud platforms, it said, as it contributes to open source communities such as OpenStack, Hadoop and Spark. In January 2016, Huawei was elected to the OpenStack board of directors.

“We are building clouds that benefit carriers the most through shortened service provisioning, reduced OPEX and automated operations and management,” said Yelai, “These improvements allow carriers to develop new business in public cloud and effectuate their transformations.”

Abraxas uses Huawei Cloud Fabric for SDN datacentre

Cloud service provider Abraxas has built a new a virtualized multi-tenant cloud datacentre in Geneva, Switzerland using Huawei’s Cloud Fabric systems.

Huawei’s Cloud Fabric will give the datacentre the foundations on which to build a software defined network later, according to outsourcing giant Abraxas, which runs cloud computing services for enterprises, government agencies and scientific research institutions across Europe.

The Cloud Fabric is built out of a network of Huawei’s CloudEngine datacentre switches to create what Huawei describes as a Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) and Ethernet Virtual Network (EVN). The Huawei equipment helped Abraxas build an ultra-large cross-datacentre Layer 2 network, which it says will give datacentre managers and cloud operators complete flexibility when installing Virtual Machine (VM) resources.

Virtualization of these core switches, using a technique that Huawei describes as “1: N”, helps to lower the running cost of the network and gives more service options with its variety of Virtual Switches (vSwitches), each of which can create completely independent autonomous sub-networks. The CloudEngine datacentre switches, when used with Huawei’s Agile Controller, can create the right conditions for a completely software defined network, when the time comes.

Abraxas needed to make more efficient use of its IT resources and to create the foundation for a strategy to migrate services onto its datacentres, said Olaf Sonderegger, ICT Architect, Infrastructure Management at Abraxas. But it also had to prepare for the virtualised future, said Sonderegger. “In order to fulfil sustainable service development, our datacentre network architecture has to be flexible enough to evolve into SDN-enabled architecture,” said Sonderegger.

Telefónica and Huawei team up over cloud migration

Reflections are seen on a logo of Spain's telecommunications giant Telefonica in MadridEquipment maker Huawei and B2B service provider Telefónica Business Solutions are to jointly offer a global service migrating clients’ internal IT systems to the cloud, reports Telecoms.com.

Under the terms of their agreement they will help enterprises to outsource the running of their own computing, storage and backup services to Telefónica’s data centres without making any infrastructure investment. The cloud services offered will be charged on a pay per use basis. According to a Huawei statement, the virtual servers will be run as ‘bare metal’ (i.e. without hypervisors.) Telefónica and Huawei will jointly run a Cloud innovation centre with the aim to contribute to the OpenStack community and help to create new cloud services.

The logistics of the arrangement involve Huawei using Telefónica’s Open Cloud service based on OpenStack in eight Telefónica data centres. Telefónica will use Huawei’s knowledge and experience on its public cloud service in the Chinese market. The first countries targeted for the service are Brazil, Mexico and Chile, where it will be launched in the first quarter of 2016. Five additional locations are planned for the same year.

Telefónica will be in a better position to serve its enterprise customers with an easily scalable system at a competitive cost, according to Juan Carlos Lopez-Vives, CEO Telefónica Business Solutions. “The combination of Telefónica’s and Huawei’s capabilities represents the best guarantee for our customers,” said Lopez-Vives.