Huawei, a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Shenzhen has decided to build a cloud, but a little differently than others. It will be based on its cut of OpenStack, but the difference is it will have a patchwork of clouds that will run by itself.

Sounds confusing? Well, yes. After the announcement was made a couple weeks ago by its CEO Eric Xu, it got many reporters and the cloud community wondering on what this could be and what exactly does Huawei plan to implement.

After many questions and clarifications and reports by many journalists, it’s clear that Huawei will create a cloud platform and will take the help of its partners to build public clouds that’ll run on this platform.

Surprisingly, Huawei has already started the process of implementing this idea. It has already entered into partnerships with companies such as Deutsche Telecom, Telefonica and Orange and they are expected to build their public cloud offerings on this platform. Besides, Huawei has its own public cloud too that it runs in China. It’s not clear if this cloud service that it offers in China will be a part of its platform.

On the software side too, Huawei has made some progress. It has built a cut of OpenStack called “FusionSphere” and another software called “FusionStage”, which is an enterprise platform-as-a-service that is built on Kunernetes and Docker. Though these products are not complete and ready for public deployment, they’re almost there. This is also partly why Huawei has started offering it to customers who may want it.

At this point, it is targeting telecom companies, especially those in the developing countries. Huawei wants to target the countries where it has a wide presence and then move on to other markets. In fact, it is offering good kits at affordable rates, so these tools are accessible to anyone in any part of the world.

Though this company has spelled out a road map for its products and for its emergence as a key cloud player, there are some aspects that are still hazy. Will Huawei run its own public cloud? Will it back local cloud providers, and if so, what’s the criteria for that? There are many such unanswered questions, but what’s clear is that all Huawei-powered clouds have unified APIs that will allow their customers to migrate their operations to the cloud.

This can bring up the question of what’s different. Well, the significant difference is that Huawei plans to reach out to countries that the top players such as AWS, Microsoft and Google will not touch for years. This is great news for these countries as well as the cloud industry as a whole because it simply means that more countries and businesses will get to enjoy the benefits of cloud. This way, global companies will also get to work with local companies since they have cloud as the common link that can bring their businesses together.

Overall, this strategy from Huawei will work well for itself as well for other small companies in developing countries, provided it is implemented  the way it was conceived.

 

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