Huawei’s Connect event kicked off earlier today – and the announcements flowed at a pace with its cloud offering front and centre of the majority of the news.
First off was the announcement of a partnership between the Chinese giant and Microsoft with Redmond’s apps being released on Huawei’s platform as part of an ‘in-depth cooperation on the public cloud.’
The two companies signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to seal the deal whereby more Microsoft enterprise-level products will be brought online.
“Huawei Cloud looks forward to cooperating with Microsoft to build an open and win-win ecosystem,” said Zheng Yelai, president of Huawei’s cloud BU and IT product line. “The signing of this MoU marks the start of strategic cooperation between the two companies.” Alain Crozier, CEO of Microsoft China, added: “Our increased collaboration will drive innovation as we build a seamless platform to benefit customers through industry-leading technology.”
Next up on the agenda – with the event theme as ‘grow with the cloud’ – was around assuring customers that Huawei has, and will continue to make, investments in the public cloud domain.
Huawei believes there will be five major global clouds – and it wants a piece of the pie, with Guo Ping, Huawei rotating CEO, citing the Matthew effect – the idea of ‘the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer’ – as reason for keeping up with the Joneses.
“The cloud is a cornerstone of the intelligent world,” he told attendees. “Society is experiencing a tangible Matthew effect in digital technology development. Because of this, as well as economies of scale in investment, clouds around the world will begin to converge – becoming more and more centralised.
“In the future, we predict there will be five major clouds in the world,” Guo added. “Huawei will work with our partners to build one of those five clouds, and we’ve got the technology and know-how to do it.”
Alongside this was the debut of Huawei’s ‘innovative enterprise intelligence’ (EI) solution, which aims to beef up enterprise cloud deployments with a bit of AI. To put this more specifically, these include machine learning, deep learning and graph analysis platforms, API services such as visual and voice recognition, as well as scenarios specific to particular industries.
A real-life example of this in action – the EI today made its international debut – is around logistics. Through EI, Huawei can offer a logistics company the best containers for packing, as well as a 3D view of each container thus improving efficiency. Data analysis can be used to clear customs at the first hurdle, as well as improve warehouse space efficiency by up to 10%.
“The best cloud must be able to deliver the services that customers need, and AI needs to create more value for enterprises,” said Zheng. “We’re positioning Huawei Cloud as an enabler of the intelligent world. It provides AI, IoT, computing, and storage capabilities that provide enterprises with more innovative, intelligent cloud services.”
You can take a look at the full list of Huawei Connect announcements here.
Picture credit: «Huawei», by «Kārlis Dambrāns«, used under CC BY 2.0 / Modified from original