Huawei pushes to transform telcos into digital service providers

At its 2015 Innovation and Transformation Summit in Bali, Huawei debuted its 2015-16 Digital inCloud program, which includes enhancements to the recently launched Digital inCloud. The company said the enhancements would facilitate ease of distribution and trade between consumers, carriers, and providers of digital content and services through "improved content aggregation and better management of local and global digital content".

According to Huawei, the service will allow telcos to "shape a digital service ecosystem" and increase revenue from digital services by connecting to Huawei's global distribution network and partner digital services to instantly deploy content to end users.

Cao Yiming, VP of Huawei's digital service product line and director of its Digital inCloud department, told ZDNet that the new enhancements include a more flexible order process, more capable online functionality, more channels in the program, and a faster settlement process enabling content and service providers to receive their share of revenue from end users sooner. He said that Digital inCloud included Huawei in the revenue-sharing model because "without the revenue from the content side, it has no value for us".

The announcements included a Digital inCloud Telecom Capability Cloud Service that gives content and service providers a one-stop shop to deliver to multiple telcos and a Global Service Innovation Cloud (GSIC), an incubation environment that content and service providers can use to prepare their services for delivery via telcos and Digital inCloud.

The Bali summit was the latest in a global series of events staged by Huawei in its bid to gain traction for the service.

Huawei debuted its Digital inCloud at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March, saying it already had 2,000 content and service providers and almost 60 telcos on the service, with more than 200,000 digital content items between them, including digital music, mobile games, video, open APIs, traffic monetisation, B2B cloud, and machine-to-machine (M2M) services. It aims to increase these numbers to more than 4,000 partners, 35,000 digital services, and 80 carriers in 2016.

The company has established a global distribution network with eight regional centres in China, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Dubai, Nigeria, Holland, and Egypt. By the end of 2015, Huawei said it will have 12 centres that, between them and its telco partners, will have access to 140 million telco customers.

The focus to date has been on telcos in developing markets.

"There are six operators in Asia Pacific already using this, and we have telcos in Latin America, in cooperation with the Telefonica Group, in Nigeria and South Africa, and in other countries," Cao said. "Many, many operators in Asia Pacific and globally are focused on transformation."

However, Huawei is also targeting mature markets.

"In Europe, we are focusing on video and on [services for] the enterprise market. Today in video, we are already working in Belgium, and in cooperation with Deutsche Telekom, and in the UK. And for enterprises, we are working with Telefonica in Europe and Latin America."