Category Archives: Huawei

Cloud Hosting, Huawei, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud, telecoms

Huawei launches new cloud hosting services for Europe

wireless area networking cloudNetworking giant Huawei has launched a series of cloud hosting services for the European mobile service provider market. It unveiled details of the Digital inCloud programme at the MVNO Networking Congress in London, where Huawei signed a memorandum of understanding with participating partners.

Digital inCloud is to be a service aggregator and distributor which allows global carriers and partners to connect. By doing so they can build a digital ecosystem comprised of different payment, message notification, voice/cloud call centres and business operations analyses from all the carriers. Digital inCloud will be a bridge between partners and telcos in digital product distribution and trading.

The European Hosting Centre will be based in the UK and run on Huawei’s MVNX platform, which can hosts more than 1 million mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) subscribers across Europe. The European hosting centre will also include a series of off-the-shelf cloud hosting services available to all European operators.

Both content and applications will be delivered ‘as-a-service’ by bridging the gap between partners and telcos in digital product distribution and trading. Currently, Huawei has aggregated 200,000 digital content items from 2100 content partners worldwide, including digital music, 2700 mobile games, 20,000 hours of premium video, live channels, open API and traffic monetization.

The Video ‘as-a-Service’ offering aggregates film from Huawei global partners, mobile network operators and virtual mobile network operators. It will support multiple definitions including SD, HD and 4K(UHD) on devices including home TVs, smartphones and tablets.

Meanwhile telcos will be able to get business support system as a service, an offering aimed particularly at MVNOs who are less likely to have the resources to afford their own systems. Similarly, Huawei’s Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) will be a more affordable and accessible way to help operators to capture customer behaviour data.

The Huawei Digital channel will create a simpler way of delivering content and improving the user experience, it said, while the Mobile Payment service will help telcos to exploit more financial applications.

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Huawei’s OceanStor could make European data centres deliver cloud in a flash

datacentre1Huawei has launched a drive to put flash memory in Europe’s data centres in a bid to speed up the delivery of cloud services.

The OceanStor Flash Strategy in Europe aims to popularise the adoption of flash memory in data centres and drag customers into the all-flash era of high performance and reliability.

Huawei’s strategy is to concentrate on partners in the industry supply chain, persuading them to make a commitment by inventing new flash controllers, media chips and enterprise storage systems based on all-flash technology, it has said. The launch of the OceanStor Flash Strategy took place at the Huawei CIO Forum and Network Congress took place in Lisbon, Portugal last week. The European drive follows in the wake of a similar programme launched in China in September.

The core of the strategy involves Huawei integrating solid-state drives (SSDs) into the storage products sold throughout Europe. The equipment maker signed its first collaboration agreement under the new strategy with flash memory provider Micron at the 2015 Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai in September.

For the same price a data centre might spend on a 15000 revs per minute hard disk, they can get an SSD that’s five times faster and has less environmental impact, argued Yuan Yaun, CTO of Huawei IT Solutions Sales in Western Europe.

“Optimal user experience and low power consumption is well suited to customers’ business needs now and in the big data future,” said Yaun. Unlike conventional enterprise storage vendors, Huawei wants to future-proof software architecture, he said, because Huawei wants to keep in line with emerging data application trends, whereas traditional storage vendors have a legacy business model to protect. Huawei is free to adopt the latest technology and to work with multiple parties in the supply chain to develop new solutions, Yaun argued.

“We cannot achieve innovation by ourselves. Everything we have created, obtained and achieved would not be possible without the joint efforts of our partners and the unflinching trust of our customers,” said Yuan.

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Huawei launches latest FusionSphere cloud operating system at Shanghai Cloud Congress

Huawei cloud eventHuawei has launched the latest version of its enterprise cloud operating system. FusionSphere 6.0 was unveiled at Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai, alongside FusionInsight and FusionStage.

The cloud operating system aims to helps customers run their services more smoothly over virtual servers, private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, desktop clouds and network function virtualisation infrastructures (NFVIs).

The strategy is to build all components, systems and ecosystems of FusionSphere on open source software and to comply with native OpenStack standards, said Joy Huang, VP of Huawei’s IT product line. It also supports OpenStack application programming interfaces (APIs) so that third-party apps based on native OpenStack can run on Huawei FusionSphere 6.0 without any adjustment.

Huawei has also released OceanStor DJ, a data service platform that offers storage and management services on demand by unifying storage resources, which it claims will raise operating operation efficiency in data centres. Administrators can now select from a menu of data management services and pool the resources across their cloud data centres. OceanStor DJ also offers archiving and offline data services.

Huawei said it is ‘working closely’ with 30 storage application vendors to provide easy to use data services such as data protection, databases, big data and data security through OceanStor DJ.

“OceanStor DJ provides storage as a service (SaaS) for enterprise IT systems, freeing up engineers from the heavy workload in managing data storage and focusing them on service transformation and innovation,” said Fan Ruiqi, president of Huawei’s storage product line.

Huawei storage products have a community of dedicated users, strong customer support and the ability to manage growing amounts of data, said Eric Sansonetti, VP of Business Partnerships at database company VoltDB. “We foresee ample opportunities to partner in the growing area of real-time analytics and data challenges,” said Sansonetti, “an open data service platform for partners will help push the development of software-defined storage.”

Huawei announced that it is currently ranked 7th in the latest official ranking of commitment to Openstack.

Huawei also participates in the open-source container field and is among the founding members of Open Container Initiative (OCI) project and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

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Huawei, partners push cloud transformation for financial IT

He: Concentrating on core competencies

He: Concentrating on core competencies

As part of its expansion into IT services and the financial services markets, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has partnered with 11 banking IT solution providers to establish an open platform ecosystem for the finance industry, reports Banking Technology.

The collaboration was announced during Huawei’s Global Financial Services Industry Summit in Beijing last week. The launch partners are Accenture (China), Beijing Advanced Digital Technology, Beijing Yucheng Technologies, Beiming Software, DHC Software, Deloitte Business Advisory Services, Digital China System Integration Service, First Data, Infosys Technologies, Micro Focus, and Worldline Technologies.

David He, president of marketing and solution sales at Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group, that that Huawei will focus on its core skills as a hardware platform provider, based around its BDII – Business-Driven ICT Infrastructure – approach.

“The new ecosystem is designed to address the IT transformation needs of financial organisations [and] promotes BDII within the financial industry by enabling our partners to focus on their core competencies,” said He. “For example, consulting firms, application vendors, and system integrators will be able to leverage their in-depth understanding and practical experience around industry applications, while Huawei, as a hardware platform provider, will focus on ICT infrastructure.”

Collaboration was one of the main themes of the event. During a keynote presentation, He said that collaboration and joint innovation between banks and vendors is essential to overcome the challenges faced by the financial services industry as it faces the dual threat of new digital and mobile technologies being harnessed by new, agile competitors.

The company also jointly published a white paper, Transformation and Reconstruction of Banks in the Digital Era, with Deloitte. In it, the two companies highlighted the need for banks to implement a digitalisation strategy supplemented by powerful and supportive systems, and IT capability construction.

The white paper argues a key component of the strategy is the transformation of cloud architecture, which enables banks to improve analysis efficiency, lower the cost of operations and innovation, and enhance data storage and disaster preparedness capabilities. In addition, big data strategies enable banks to quickly respond to real-time customer demands by analysing massive volumes of customer data. The transformation from multi-channel to omni-channel systems will also help banks provide consistent and seamless customer experiences.

By launching the open platform ecosystem for the finance industry, Huawei and its partners hope to help financial institutions migrate from closed to open IT architectures and enable enhanced customer experience and convenient service innovations in a safe and reliable operating environment.

As part of the collaboration, Huawei is working with other members of the ecosystem to launch a range of open platform-based solutions for the finance industry, including an online banking cloud (based on private cloud architecture for finance), a credit loan cloud, a direct banking cloud, a micro-and-small-loan service cloud, a core account cloud, a credit card core application cloud, as well as mobile teller and home banking capabilities. These solutions have helped companies including the Spanish Bolsas y Mercados Españoles exchange build a cloud-based equity trading system.

“Huawei facilitates IT architecture transformation within the finance industry by providing highly reliable x86 cluster systems to support core transaction systems, in addition to cloud architecture for finance that supports the transformation of the business and processes of banks,” said Wang Hongfeng, general manager, finance solutions, in Huawei’s EBG.. “Huawei also provides platform resources support through our open labs, innovation centres, authentication centres, and secondary development and remote support. Through cross-practice cooperation, Huawei hopes to speed up the evolution toward open platform architecture in the financial services industry.”

Huawei, Italy, NDV, Networks, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud, vodafone

Vodafone Italy launches NFV, cloud-based VoLTE

Vodafone Italy is working with Huawei on what the two claim to be the world's first cloud-based VoLTE deployment

Vodafone Italy is working with Huawei on what the two claim to be the world’s first cloud-based VoLTE deployment

Vodafone is the latest carrier to push ahead with rolling out a voice over LTE (VoLTE) service, with its Italian subsidiary launching the service, reports Telecoms.com.

Setting this VoLTE project apart from other operators pursuing the calling technology, however, is the contribution from Huawei to launch the service on a cloud-based IMS core network. Essentially, the service launch is a live demonstration of NFV in action, with it relying on NFV-compliant core network solutions that are interoperable with commercial off the shelf (COTS) infrastructures. In this instance, the IMS and element management system (EMS) are virtualized, managed by the snappily titled “MANO-VNFM” (management and orchestration virtualized network function management).

Huawei reckons this constitutes a world first, and builds upon work conducted during ETSI NFV ISG’s proof of concept trials. ZTE, China Unicom and HP collaborated on developing a VoLTE service based on vEPC (evolved packet core) and vIMS architecture during one such PoC, and it seems Huawei and Vodafone have steamed ahead with a real-world deployment since the project was demonstrated in January.

A statement released by Huawei referenced the NFV partnership with Vodafone in the wider context of converging the ICT and telecoms worlds. “These innovating are the fruits of partnerships with major operators and join solution optimisation as ongoing processes at Huawei,” it said. “Media plane acceleration, fully automated operation, NFV-based capability exposure, and intelligent network slicing are key areas for NFV consolidation. These future goals are the core of Huawei’s commitment to facilitating cloud transformation for operators.”

Vodafone Italy’s VoLTE rollout, while allegedly being the first to utilise NFV infrastructure, is one of a growing number of European rollouts. Vodafone Germany launched the service in March, while it’s targeting a launch in the UK market at some point this summer. EE and Three, meanwhile, are both looking at a summer 2015 launch date for VoLTE services, as Europe plays catch up with the Far East already leading the way with matured rollouts of the next generation calling technology.

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Box, Docker, eBay, Google among newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is putting Linux containers at the core of its definition of 'cloud-native' apps

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is putting Linux containers at the core of its definition of ‘cloud-native’ apps

The Linux Foundation along with a number of enterprises, cloud service providers , telcos and vendors have banded together to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in a bid to standardise and advance Linux containerisation for cloud.

The newly formed open source foundation, a Linux Foundation collaborative project, plans to create and drive adoption of common container technologies at the orchestration level, and integrate hosts and services by defining common APIs and standards.

The organisation also plans to assemble specifications to address a “comprehensive set of container application infrastructure needs.”

The members at launch include AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Switch Supernap, Twitter, Univa, VMware and Weaveworks.

“The Cloud Native Computing Foundation will help facilitate collaboration among developers and operators on common technologies for deploying cloud native applications and services,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

“By bringing together the open source community’s very best talent and code in a neutral and collaborative forum, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aims to advance the state-of-the-art of application development at Internet scale,” Zemlin said.

The central goal of the foundation will be to harmonise container standards and techniques. A big challenge with containers today is there are many, many ways to implement them, with a range of ‘open ecosystems’ and vendor-specific approaches, all creating one heterogeneous, messy pool of technologies that don’t always play well together.

That said, the foundation expects to build on other existing open source container initiatives including Docker’s recently announced Open Container Initiative (OCI), with which it will work on building its container image spec into the standards it develops. Google also announced that the foundation would henceforth govern development of Kubernetes, which reached v.1 this week, over to the foundation.

“Google is committed to advancing the state of computing, and to helping businesses everywhere benefit from the patterns that have proven so effective to us in operating at Internet scale,” said Craig McLuckie, product manager at Google. “We believe that this foundation will help harmonize the broader ecosystem, and are pleased to contribute Kubernetes, the open source cluster scheduler, to the foundation as a seed technology.”

Ben Golub, chief executive of Docker said while the OCI offers a solid foundation for container-based computing many standards and fine details have yet to be agreed.

“At the orchestration layer of the stack, there are many competing solutions and the standard has yet to be defined. Through our participation in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we are pleased to be part of a collaborative effort that will establish interoperable reference stacks for container orchestration, enabling greater innovation and flexibility among developers. This is in line with the Docker Swarm integration with Mesos,” Golub said.

Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Huawei, News & Analysis, Salesforce, SAP, T-Systems, Telco Cloud

Deutsche Telekom wants to double cloud revenues by 2018

Deutsche Telekom wants to bolster its cloud business

Deutsche Telekom wants to bolster its cloud business

Deutsche Telekom said this week aims to redouble efforts to beat out big IT incumbents in the increasingly lucrative cloud services segment. Through the telco’s IT-focused subsidiary it intends to double cloud revenues over the next three years.

The company said it wants to start generating upwards of two billion euros annually from cloud services by 2018, double what it says it currently pulls in.

“At Deutsche Telekom, we want to grow by more than 20 percent each year in the field of cloud platforms, and to become the leading provider for businesses in Europe,” said Ferri Abolhassan, head of the IT Division at T-Systems.

Last year revenues from cloud solutions, in particular private cloud services, increased double digits at the firm, Abolhassan explained. But with the battle for cloud revenue heating up with more traditional IT service providers and vendors the company needs to scale up its cloud activities both within and outside T-Systems.

“The market for services from the public cloud – infrastructure, platforms and applications – that can be accessed through the public Internet promises further growth. In conjunction with partners, Deutsche Telekom plans to pit itself more strongly against the Internet corporations Google and Amazon in future. To achieve this, the departments within Deutsche Telekom’s segments are now stepping up their cloud activities across the Group,” he said, adding that DT will also continue to try and differentiate on security.

Telco’s haven’t been the natural choice for enterprise IT professionals but over the past few years many like DT have stepped up their cloud strategies, a move which largely sees them both acquiring successful cloud incumbents and integrate them into their own operations – for instance Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark, or CenturyLink’s acquisition of Savvis – and using their existing commercial telecoms and managed services clients as direct channels.

Partnerships are also key in this segment and earlier this year DT announced a flurry of cloud-centric deals with Cisco, Huawei, SAP and Salesforce. That said, the move could be a sign DT will soon ramp up partnerships with other big cloud providers or ISVs – or head down the M&A route.

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Huawei’s details connected car partnerships with Audi, Volkswagen

Huawei is pushing forward with a number of connected car partnerships this week

Huawei is pushing forward with a number of connected car partnerships this week

Chinese networking giant Huawei is going big on the connected car market this week with the announcement of partnerships with German car makers Audi and Volkswagen, reports Telecoms.com.

This week’s news specifically concerns Volkswagen, with the demonstration at CES Asia of some MirrorLink-based technology that enables smartphones apps to be used on the vehicle-mounted systems. While this sort of thing has been around for a while, it seems that Huawei is facilitating the integration of MirrorLink technology in VW cars, all of which will feature it by next year.

“Our cooperation with Huawei will seamlessly blend the capabilities of users’ smartphones with the systems in their cars,” said Sven Patuschka, executive vice president for R&D of Volkswagen Group China. “All content on the phone will be shown in real time on the car’s infotainment touch screen. The result is smart and convenient interaction between phone and car.”

Earlier this week at the same show Huawei unveiled an R&D partnership with Audi, but this time focused on “interconnected car technology”, which seems to mean embedded modems.

“We see the unlimited opportunities available in the interconnected car market and we are excited about our partnership with Audi Group,” said Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei Consumer Business Group. “By partnering with industry-leading automobile companies like Audi, Huawei aims to bring the best interconnection services and solutions to the next generation of cars, while actively promoting interaction between cars, smartphones, wearables and people, creating a seamless communication experience and driving environment.”

The connected car has long been viewed as the next major opportunity for the tech industry, but it has been slow to develop. One of the main reasons is the relatively long lead times in the automotive industry, which means bets have to be made on embedded technology standards that may be obsolete by the time the car comes to market. The answer, of course, is open standards, but as ever we have to wait for the proprietary land-grab to exhaust itself first.

Visit Connected Cars 15 to find out all about connected car business models and technologies.

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Deutsche Telekom announces flurry of cloud partnerships with SAP, Salesforce, Cisco, Huawei

Deutsche Telekom announced a slew of cloud partnerships this week

Deutsche Telekom announced a slew of cloud partnerships this week

Deutsche Telekom announced a number of cloud-focused partnerships with Salesforce, SAP, Huawei and Cisco at CeBIT this week.

T-Systems, the telco’s enterprise-focused subsidiary, worked with Salesforce to develop a Customer Experience platform for the automotive sector, which the companies said would connect dealers, workshops, vehicles and customers more closely via an interactive showroom on customers’ mobile phones.

Additionally, the company said it is working closely with consulting giant Deloitte to advise European clients on how to implement the cloud-based CRM platform.

It is also making SAP SuccessFactors available to corporate customers, and next month the company plans to implement the cloud-based human resources management platform internally to serve the company’s 220,000 employees.

Lastly, the firm announced an update to its September 2014 deal with Cisco to become an Intercloud partner. T-Systems is currently installing Cisco’s OpenStack-based infrastructure in datacentre in Biere, near Magdeburg, and said the first Software-as-a-Service product, a managed hotspot for small and medium-sized business, will be available in the second quarter of 2015.

Cisco is one of a number of DT’s partners when it comes to cloud infrastructure. This week the German telco also signed a global framework agreement with Huawei that will see the latter provide IT infrastructure and private cloud solutions to T-Systems.

The telco is aggressively moving forward with plans to expand its reach in the cloud sector. Ferri Abolhassan, director of the IT division at T-Systems, described the partnerships as “a systematic step on the part of T-Systems to consolidate its technology leadership in all matters cloud in Europe, and to expand globally.”