Huawei, a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices, unveiled its first suite of global scenario-based cloud solutions at the Carrier Cloud Transformation Summit as part of its Win-Win Huawei Innovation Week, which took place last week virtually. The launch comes at a juncture of extensive investments in the cloud space by carriers, as gaps in IT capabilities continue to weigh heavily on their digital transformation ambitions.
The carrier-cloud advantage
In his keynote address, Chen Xuejun, Director of Huawei Carrier IT Marketing & Solution Sales Department iterated that for carriers to be able to ride the new growth curve driven by technologies such as cloud computing, big data, AI and edge computing, they must strengthen their cloud capabilities to expand existing offerings and spur new innovations.
Carriers’ focus on the cloud is precipitated largely by their burgeoning IT workloads. The rise of computing-intensive, low-latency applications and services require a new level of scalability and agility delivered via high performance clouds and cloud-native technologies.
Chen Xuejun, presenting on Huawei Cloud at the Win-Win Huawei Innovation Week
Ramping up monetization, innovation and efficiency
Addressing these needs, Huawei’s suite of cloud solutions takes a three-pronged approach with the aim of monetizing carrier networks, speeding up innovation and optimizing operations. The first of the solutions, cloud-network collaboration solutions, enables carriers to boost their traditional connectivity services with IT offerings such as cloud, security and analytics. Tapping into Huawei Cloud, carriers are able to beef up their B2B offerings and create new upsell opportunities while capitalizing on their existing network assets, leading to greater monetization. Chen Xuejun explained how a Chinese carrier leveraged cloud, network and security services to expand the coverage of traditional solutions with integrated ICT for a multiplier boost in value.
The second solution leverages Huawei’s advanced cloud platform to accelerate service innovation. Here, carriers can utilize Huawei’s agile development methods and its expertise in innovating telecom applications and network services to speed up time-to-market. The cloud platform grants ready access to highly-customized tools such as CloudNative Application developing platform to enable new add-ons, features and whole applications to be rapidly developed, tested and perfected. Chen Xuejun shared an example of an African carrier who saw the rollout time for its mobile wallet application being reduced from months to just weeks. This was achieved by tapping into the cloud platform’s efficiencies, resource scalability and expanded capabilities enabled through a rich ecosystem.
Responding to carriers’ needs in the 5G era, Huawei’s third solution - the pre-optimized cloud solution - is aimed at driving operational efficiency. The solution equips carriers with deep insights which are delivered through collaborative data analysis using Huawei’s distributed data lake solution. According to Chen Xuejun, the pre-optimized cloud solution is aimed at bolstering the growth of carriers’ conventional services. An Asian carrier which had a take-up rate of only 10% on its 5G services had used the insights drawn from a collaborative analysis of its BSS and OSS data using Huawei’s advanced customer experience management solution, SmartCare. This powered a range of real-time contextual targeting efforts, improving the carrier’s 5G conversion rate by 180%.
Digital China
During the event, Li Gang, CTO at Digital China, a leading cloud-based digital service provider, shared how Huawei Cloud has been instrumental in the development of its suite of cloud offerings spanning managed hosting services, consulting, migration, big data, robotic process automation, disaster recovery, operations and management (O&M) and security.
The cloud capacity and cost optimization powered by Huawei Cloud enabled Digital China to undertake large scale transformation projects across various sectors. Notable projects include a large-scale application migration from the private cloud to Huawei’s distributed cloud for a high-tech conglomerate; deployment of a multi-cloud management platform that involved multiple technology stacks; and an end-to-end migration project spanning host, database and container clusters. Other projects include the development of a PaaS container platform based on heterogeneous computing.
Diving into the details of an insurance industry case study, Li Gang explained how regulatory requirements, business bottlenecks and demand from the younger user base pushed an insurance company to enhance its cloud computing and big data capabilities, being two critical areas for risk control and claim assessment. The transformation entailed a Hadoop-based migration and the migration of big data analytics to Huawei Cloud and the implementation of a one-stop O&M.
Ensuring cloud success
With more than 120 carrier cloud collaborations under its belt, Huawei emphasizes the importance of ensuring that a carrier’s chosen pathway to the cloud takes into consideration its value proposition, strengths, market nature, service portfolio as well as its stage of application and cloud maturity. In this aspect, Chen Xuejun believes that deep industry expertise, long standing experience in ICT and a strong local presence brought by deployment partners can go a long way in ensuring a carrier’s success on this challenging, albeit highly rewarding journey.
Learn more:
Huawei Debuts Versatile Cloud Solutions to Turbocharge New Growth for Carriers
Huawei’s Solutions on Building Intelligent Infrastructure to Support Carriers’ Digital Transformation
