This week, telecoms giant Huawei held its annual Global Analyst Summit, attended by over 400 analysts and business leaders from the telecom, Internet and finance industries.
With highlights including the Global Connectivity Index and the Petabit Core Router(link both!), the summit was less new launches and more about reinforcing the company’s approach to business and strategy. Making the near 6,000 mile trip to Shenzhen, China, Editor Ellie Burns brings you the highlights from the 2015 summit.
1. Open Cooperation
The agenda at this year’s summit was clearly driven my a message of industry cooperation. Tying into the company’s shift in service strategy, Huawei was keen to stress that in oder to innovate and move the industry forward, openness was vital. As such, Huawei pointed to its standards organisations and open source communities as evidence of its efforts to develop an ecosystem based on cooperation. At the summit, Ryan Ding, Huawei’s Chief Products and Solutions Officer, commented:
"In the Better Connected World, there will be tens of millions of industry-specific applications. Openness and innovation will be the way forward. Huawei will focus on network infrastructure, IT infrastructure, and digital infrastructure, and will partner with industry players to develop highly competitive solutions."
2. Open ROADS – Ultimate User Experience
Initially launched at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the summit served as the perfect opportunity for Huawei to reiterate its vision for the ICT industry. ROADS, an acronym standing for Real-time, On-demand, All-online, DIY, and Social, is a vision for the ultimate user experience.
Kicking off the two day-event, William Xu, Chief Strategy Marketing Officer, said in his keynote address: "We are now in a new era of revolution, shifting from a traditional society to an information society, The ways in which end users work, live, and learn are vastly different from what came before. They are growing more reliant on the Internet. They need an experience that can be summarised as ‘ROADS."
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3. Revised Service Strategy
It’s not all about products for Huawei anymore. Huawei’s Rotating and Acting CEO, Eric Xu, revealed that the company’s Carrier Business will shift from focusing on "product driven + service as support" to "product driven + service driven." Xu commented:
"We’ve redefined our carrier business strategy. Instead of prioritising products over services, we are now attaching equal importance to both of them. We will invest more in services to provide customised commercial solutions that suit the different requirements of carriers at different development stages."
Following on from William Xu at the first day keynote, he detailed how the need is now to provide a system that creates value, shifting IT’s role as a supporting system to that of a production system. While Huawei’s Enterprise business will now follow the "being integrated" strategy, focusing on enabling partners, Huawei’s Consumer business will shift its service focus from after-sales service, to a full, lifecycle user experience.
The goal is for Huawei to become the leader in CEM, standing for Customer Experience Management, with Eric Xu commenting: "We are striving to evolve managed services from network-oriented to service- and experience-oriented, and from OPEX saving to value creation."
4. Drive into consultancy role
Dr Leroy Blimegger Jr., Global President of Assured & Managed Services, revealed Huawei’s plans to take on a more consultative role in the industry.
Assuring the assembled audience that Huawei did not ‘want to be PwC’, Blimegger Jr. revealed the company’s intention to take the best bits of what consultancies offer in order to give the best possible options to customers. With 600 consultants confirmed to join Huawei’s ranks, Blimegger Jr. spoke of the need for Huawei to have a ‘consulting capability’, while also negotiating the company’s current relationships with consultancies like PwC and Accenture.
In what he termed ‘co-opetition’, the Global President said that Huawei would continue to work and engage with companies like PwC, but there would be some competition in other areas in the foreseeable future.
5. NetEngine 9000 – remove?
Addressing the growing pressures on backbone networks, Huawei launched the NetEngine 9000 (NE9000) petabit core router. Boasting the industry’s largest capacity, the router has been designed to meet the networks’ move to a data centre-cetric approach. This new approach to networks is due to the increasing pressures put on networks by the rapid growth of Ultra High Definition (UHD) videos and migration to cloud services.
Gai Gang, President of the Router and Carrier Ethernet Product Line remarked: "The Huawei NE9000, the industry’s largest petabit core router platform can accelerate the innovation for high-end router technologies and network architecture, meeting operator demands for next generation DC-centric networks.
"Delivering cloud and video services, Huawei hopes to help operators to provide an intelligent and efficient network, which bring subscribers an inspiring experience."
6. America – Security
When the floor was opened to the audience to ask questions of the Huawei execs, many could forsee the inevitable America question. When asked about general political tensions, Eric Xu confidently stated that political tensions had no impact on business or business growth and that processes carry on as normal.
When it comes to America, security is pushed front and centre. When asked about the security issues of a connected world, CEO Xu stated that security was high on the company’s agenda and an area of heavy investment for the company. He highlighted the company’s privacy & security committee, in addition to its security labs, in order to highlight that Huawei was taking the issue seriously at the present moment. The key message revolving around security, and the focus of the entire summit, was that of collaboration. Xu said that ‘security cannot be addressed by one company alone,’ and that collaboration across the industry is needed.
