Huawei to invest $500M to boost cloud capabilities, services
Huawei Technologies is setting aside US$500 million over five years to build up its cloud capabilities and infrastructure.
These would include plans to develop cloud-focused professional services as well as establish a certification programme, said the Chinese tech giant Wednesday at its annual conference Huawei Connect in Shanghai.
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With this renewed strategy, it said it was targeting to help customers to "build, use, and manage" their cloud infrastructures via its enterprise services, which would encompass support for smart operations and digital platforms as well as business enablement.
Huawei's president of technical services for enterprise business group, Sun Maolu, said: "With the emergence of a 'cloud only' era... Our services strategy centres on the concept of 'grow with the cloud' and becoming an industry cloud enabler."
The vendor said it would increase investment in its Global Service Centers, which provided professional services including network operations, network performance management, and benchmark and service quality management. It currently operated such facilities in China, Romania, and Mexico.
Over the five-year period, Huawei also would increase its annual investment in research and development of industry clouds by 50 percent and establish a certification programme to train architects, developments, and industry-specific skillsets.
It further projected that it would certify more than 150,000 cloud and industry-specific ICT professionals by 2021.
Huawei last year said cloud was expected to help drive its enterprise revenue up to the tune of US$10 billion by 2018, though, this was a revised target from 2017 previously.
Earlier this year, it also said it was readying plans to offer public cloud services beyond its domestic Chinese market, having set up a new cloud business unit to drive such efforts. Eric Xu, Huawei's deputy chairman and rotating CEO, had acknowledged that players such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) already were entrenched in the public cloud market and had strong advantages in the US and other developed markets.
However, Xu said, Huawei had strong telco partnerships in Europe and focused on building "local, secured, and trusted" public cloud. He added that these were key considerations for enterprises in these developed markets.