In a world where fierce competition is increasingly becoming the soul of business, finding a company that is willing to open its doors and sharing its winning formulas is a rarity. Yet, the world has found one: Huawei! By MKPE ABANG
Open your vault of technological knowledge for the entire world to feast from and be good. It sounds too good to be true; but that precisely is what Huawei, the world’s leading information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider has chosen to do – of its own accord!
Go back memory lane: 29 years ago, Ren Zhengfei, a former engineer in the People’s Liberation Army of China, founded the company with just the equivalent of $3,000 – that was 21,000 yuan. At the time the company was mostly selling telephone exchange equipment from Hong Kong. It would have appeared like pipe’s dream to suggest that one year shy of three decades the same company would become the defining institution for technology solutions in the world.
Today Huawei, headquartered in Shenzhen, China, has partnered with telecom carriers across the world to build over 1,500 networks thereby helping over one-third of the world’s population connect to the Internet. In 2015, its revenue reached US$60.8 billion, an increase of 37% year-on-year; so significant has the company become that there is hardly any aspect or area where its name does not feature – and prominently so.
Having established a competitive ICT portfolio of end-to-end solutions in telecom and enterprise networks, devices, and cloud computing, Huawei’s ICT solutions, products, and services are used in more than 170 countries and regions employing more than 170,000 employees while serving over one-third of the world’s population.
All that will fittingly pass as the result of a successful company consequent upon the hard work of its workforce and visionary leadership. But when Huawei took on the mantra of “committed to enabling the future information society,” it became very apparent that the company was on a whole new bold vision and mission: that of “building a Better Connected World.”
Moving from that premise therefore, Huawei, brushing aside fears in various quarters, especially in the West, of technologies and companies from China, has set about embracing and bring under one umbrella, all other companies – from all planets of the world – in a new push, in the cloud era, thus opening up its own strategies to the entire world.
Open Cloud
Thus with an unmatched zeal and a thoroughly well-articulated plan like never before, Huawei is marshalling the world to a new order, to work together in an era that obviously belongs to ICTs – the cloud. Of great importance really are Huawei’s desire and readiness to work with so many and everyone around the world to achieve ‘a better connected world.’
This desire was translated into action with the hosting of the first Huawei Connect conference in Shanghai, China. Held from August 31 through September 2, 2016, the conference was almost an amalgamation of the crème de la crème of the world’s ICT industry; especially so, companies that would ordinarily appear as competition to Huawei!
It is a game for the clouds; as indeed, that has become the happening place. And Huawei says better navigate the cloud as a team than as a loner.
With over 20,000 people brought from across the world to the city of Shanghai, ranging from network operating companies to fellow vendors or telecom equipment manufacturers, from software companies to internet tech firms, from banking to security, the Huawei Connect 2016 conference – the first global annual flagship event that targets the entire ICT industry – was a partnership that centred on the theme: “Shape the Cloud”.
The cost of organising and hosting such a huge conference must be monumental; but it is the sheer thought of initiating it all by Huawei that deserves all accolades and commendations. It was a global technological carnival for laying the foundation for the future of telecommunication and ICT. The HCC might have been conceived by Huawei; but it has become a global phenomenon.
At the rate the world is growing with technology growing beyond mere person to person communication, with human and machine multiplying almost beyond geometric progression, it will require more than the superhuman or the magical, to keep communication both safe and assured. Added to that now the element of Internet of Things, and, as the cloud beckons, so do security issues crop up, especially with growing concerns over cybersecurity.
It must have been all these concerns and worries that led Huawei to think of a uniform and single channel for collaboration to build the cloud that the world can feel secure and comfortable to entrust data that have grown from mere micro to big data. The conception of the Huawei Connect conference is a manifestation of the thoughts of founder, Zhengfei, who told Forbes’ in 2015:
“Over the past 28 years, Huawei has been opening up to the world. Because of this openness, we have exchanged energy with the outside world, and Huawei has become what it is today.”
Indeed, Huawei has exchanged energy; but that was just the beginning. For, the company will continue to exchange energies especially as the Huawei Connect conference has been envisioned to be an annual event.
For the first Huawei Connect 2016 conference, the list of paper topics and speakers underscored the importance Huawei and its various partners from all parts of the world, attached to the event. For instance, all of the three Huawei’s Rotating Chief Executive Officers presented keynote papers.
Keynote speakers include Ken Hu, Deputy Chairman of the Board, Rotating CEO, Huawei, who opened the conference with a powerful keynote speech that set the tone for the entire event, entitled: ‘A Better View from the Cloud’.
Others were the Chief Information Officer of SAP, Thomas Saueressig, who spoke on ‘The Future of Cloud Migration’; Yan Lida, President, Huawei Enterprise BG spoke on ‘Reinventing Business with Industry Clouds’ while Darryl West, Chief Information Officer of HSBC, spoke on ‘Digital Transformation at HSBC’. There was also the paper ‘Telecom Carriers’ Cloud Strategy Innovation,’ presented by Gao Tongqing, Vice President of China Telecom and another ‘Becoming Digital Industrial’ presented by Denzil Samuels, Global Head of Channels, Alliances, Business Development, and Ventures, General Electric.
Adding their powerful voices during Day 1 of the conference were Zou Zhilei, President, Huawei Carrier BG, who spoke on Cloud Era: Growing Together With Partners; Anette Bronder, Director of Digital Division, T-Systems International (Deutsche Telekom), who spoke on ‘Pathing the Way for A Digital World’ and Juan Carlos López Vives, CEO，Telefónica Business Solutions, whose paper was titled ‘Where Connectivity and Cloud Combine to Transform Your Business.’
The very loaded conference opened on Day 2 with the keynote paper entitled ‘Embrace and Integrate with the Cloud to Become a Digital Enterprise’ delivered by Eric Xu, Deputy Chairman of the Board, Rotating CEO, Huawei, and followed in quick succession by the paper ‘Disruptions Driving the Future’ by Vishal Sikka, Chief Executive Officer of Infosys; then Zheng Yelai, President, Huawei IT Product Line, spoke on ‘Shape the Cloud, Bridge Today to Tomorrow.’ The over 20,000 audience also heard from Guillaume Lemoine, Senior Broadcast Architect, TF1 Group, who spoke on ‘Cloud Innovation Tides in the Media Industry’; followed by the paper ‘Agile Network: For the Cloud, By the Cloud’ presented by Liu Shaowei, President, Huawei Enterprise Network Product Line; ‘IoT Evolving the Building Experience’ by John Rajchert, President, Honeywell Building Solutions; ‘The Future of Technology and Innovation, by Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management.
It is important to note that Professor Andrew McAfee, an MIT scientist, studies how technological progress changes business, the economy, and society. He is the co-author (with Erik Brynjolfsson) of the bestseller The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies and the cofounder of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.
To show how diversified the Huawei Connect 2016 conference was (and how the target of the conference is dreamed and planned to be going forward), Day 3 of the conference opened with a paper ‘Rainforest: Tao of Connectedness’ by Li Minguo, Founder of the “TianZi Biodiversity & Development Centre”; this was quickly followed by yet another Deputy Chairman of the Board, Rotating CEO, Huawei, Guo Ping, who spoke on the topic ‘Shaping the Dynamics of an Open Cloud Ecosystem.’
Other papers include ‘Inventing the Future through Collaboration’ by Brian Krzanich, Intel, CEO; ‘Together: Dream Big, Fly High’ by Ryan Ding, President, Huawei Products & Solutions; ‘Safeguarding Our Cities’ by Steven Cost, President, Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure; also on the last day, was the paper ‘Accelerates the Journey to Digitisation,’ by Kamran Ikram, Managing Director for UKI Infrastructure Services, Accenture, and finally ‘Open Source Powers The Cloud Ecosystem’ by Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation, thereby closing the main event’s agenda.
Alongside the main conference however several side events took place; from mini-summits to streaming sessions; from technology tracks to industry tracks to exhibitions of the latest solutions in power, education, safe city; it was a full three-day event that kept every one of the over 20,000 delegates from over 120 countries busy; just as Huawei officials – from the highest to the very least – we kept busy thereby producing a most successful conference.
As envisioned by its organisers, the Huawei Connect 2016 boasted an interactive exhibition hall covering an area of over 18,000 m2 at the World Expo Centre in Shanghai, of which 9,000 m2 was used to showcase the capabilities of Huawei’s industry partners while independent meeting areas were also amply available for the communication of industry partners.