Huawei asserted it’s building “one of the world’s five clouds” during its Huawei Connect 2017 event in Shanghai today. The company reportedly sees Amazon, Google, Microsoft and China’s Alibaba as its four other large-scale rivals. Huawei places more specialised networks, such as IBM’s, below these massive public platforms.
Huawei’s setting out to create a global cloud network. It will work with its partners to create infrastructure around the world. The company is targeting the enterprise market, describing cloud tech as a “major cornerstone” of modern IT. Huawei believes it can make a late entry into the cloud because of the scale of its existing networks. Even against the dominance of its rivals, Huawei claimed 50 percent of global web users are already reliant on its platform in some way.
“The digital transformation in many industries will bring human beings to an intelligent world in the future, and innovation will be the driving force of the revolution,” said Joy Huang, vice president of Huawei’s IT products. “Increasingly, innovation will take place in the cloud, and the cloud will need the all-round strength. Huawei Cloud is committed to be an enabler of intelligent world, delivering continuous innovations of technologies and capabilities on Huawei Cloud to help customers succeed in their digital transformation.”
Huawei’s partnering with regional telecoms operators and network specialists across the world. Huawei will provide cloud infrastructure to these companies who’ll then resell it to customers. Although the services will run on Huawei’s infrastructure and in its data centres, they’ll be outwardly branded and operated under the names of its partners. Huawei will form the backbone through which different clouds interconnect.
Huawei’s long taken a different approach to cloud data than its primary rivals. It has steadfastly committed itself to not monetising user data, instead building products that help customers monetise as required.
Huawei Cloud is the latest product of this vision, an architecture that’s essentially open for customers to use as they see fit. It can be a fully public cloud or an on-premises private one. In any form, it has the option of transferring data to other areas of Huawei’s network.
Huawei already has some big clients signed up to its technology. CERN uses the jointly developed Huawei and Deutsche Telekom cloud to run maintenance on the Large Hadron Collider. In enterprise, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and government partners have opted to use Huawei-powered solutions. Huawei Cloud’s just the company’s latest step in its transition to a cloud-first model, aiming to offer a compelling alternative to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
