The anticipated Huawei Connect flagship event by Huawei, kicked off its global tour in Bangkok, Thailand this week.
Unleashing Digital
Under the theme "Unleash Digital", this hybrid event brought together over 10,000 ICT industry leaders, experts, and partners from around the world. After a tough couple of years, coming together to shape a better, smarter and more integrated future, is more paramount than ever.
Events like this is what makes it possible to have real-time discussions that help shape the evolution of our society.
The main goal this year: to explore how to more effectively unleash digital productivity, promote the digital economy, and build up stronger digital ecosystems.
Ken Hu, Rotating Chairman at Huawei, delivered a powerful opening keynote.
"We are on the cusp of a digital revolution" Hu said. "All industries are turning to digital technology to boost resilience and productivity, and to reinvent their business models. The digital revolution is happening right now. The demand is there, and so are the technologies."
The pandemic has hit the world hard, and all industries understand there is an urgent need to upgrade their digital strategies. Going digital is a clear choice.
Did you know only the digital economy has seen consistent growth on a global scale, with more than 15% growth in 2021?
To break through bottlenecks in Digital Transformation Mr Hu focused on 3 areas:
➡️ Boosting digital infrastructure
➡️ Make the most of cloud
➡️ Building a stronger ecosystem
Boosting digital infrastructure – Laying the groundwork for digital transformation
Digital infrastructure is the foundation of digital transformation. In particular, connectivity and computing infrastructure are two key pillars, and they both need major upgrades
To meet future demand, Huawei is working hard to build stronger infrastructure for diversified computing, including better coordination between cloud, edge, and devices. They are also driving new innovation in computing architectures and holistic system performance to boost overall performance and efficiency.
Making the most of cloud – Enabling leapfrog development
By 2025, 95% of all new digital workloads will be deployed directly on the cloud. But are organizations ready? Mr Hu said they are doing what we they can to help organizations go beyond simple cloud adoption and truly make the most of cloud.
One of the case studies he shared was a major hospital in Xi'an, China. With Huawei's pre-trained AI models, they are greatly speeding up the pharmaceutical R&D process. In the past, it took years to identify lead compounds that form the basis for new medicines. Now they can do the same work in about one month.
Another one was in the finance sector. He shared how The Green Link Digital Bank in Singapore, thanks to using cloud-native development services, fully developed their banking system and services in less than one year, instead of the average two to three years. With shorter development cycles, they can also react quickly to new customer needs.
Currently, this tech giant provides more than 240 cloud services and over 50,000 APIs to help enterprises take full advantage of new technology whenever and wherever they need it.
Building a stronger ecosystem
The focus on this area is helping their partners build digital portfolios, cultivating digital talent, and supporting SMEs.
Working with local schools and governments, so far they have helped train more than 4,000 people in 12 countries. In Asia-Pacific, their ASEAN academy and Seeds for the Future program will help expand the digital talent pool by 500,000 people by 2026.
For startups they provide a number of resources to help them use cloud effectively with lower upfront costs, so startups can focus on growing their core business
My key takeaways from Mr Hu's keynote
➡️ Collaboration is key, the industry must continue working with partners to build infrastructures the right way.
➡️ Pay attention to the future demand, to be able to develop tech in an efficient manner.
Go Cloud, Go Global
Zhang Ping’an, CEO of Huawei Cloud, released the "Go Cloud, Go Global" plan. With a focus on everything as a service, Huawei Cloud will share its localized experience acquired in the services for more than 170 countries and regions, as well as insight into businesses and industries in major regions, and contribute its technologies and solutions to a global ecosystem.
Huawei Cloud sticks to the approach of "by local, for local" for building a global digital ecosystem. Over the next three years, Huawei Cloud will provide support for at least 10,000 promising startups around the world, with support including cost optimization, technical support, entrepreneurship training, and other business resources. More than 120 enterprises in Asia Pacific have joined the Huawei Cloud Startup Program.
Empower industry and creating value
By now, we all know the COVID-19 pandemic is changing the way we work and live. To handle these uncertainties, companies are investing in faster digital transformation.
Ryan Ding, President of Huawei Enterprise shared powerful numbers
➡️ The global digital economy grew by 15.6% in 2021
➡️ Companies increasing digital transformation strategy was up by 42% compared to two years ago
➡️ Enterprise investment in digital transformation is set to grow at 16.5% per year from 2022 to 2024.
Mr. Ding continued by sharing how Huawei has invested 22.4 billion US dollars in R&D (a total over the last decade of 132.5 billion USD)
Thanks to that huge investment, they have created many cutting-edge technologies in connectivity, computing, and cloud.
Examples:
➡️ Using the iLossless algorithm, they developed CloudEngine, the industry's only data center switch with zero packet loss.
➡️ AirEngine AP series uses the industry's only air interface slicing technology, to provide signal control channels with five-nines availability.
➡️ They use full optical switching and optical backplanes to develop an all-optical switching architecture that reduces physical size by 90% and power consumption by 60%.
➡️ OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage uses the industry's only fully interconnected architecture and SAN/NAS, active-active disaster recovery solution to deliver seven-nines availability.
Innovative Solutions Launch
On the second day of Huawei Connect 2022 Bangkok, Huawei launched a range of innovative infrastructure solutions to drive industry digitalization by finding the right technology for the right scenario.
At the event, Huawei launched the Huawei Empower Program, a global partner development plan. This program will help Huawei's partners build three types of capabilities to better serve customers: digital transformation consulting and planning, product and portfolio expertise, and solution development.
As I always say, to have trust in digital, we need to educate, collaborate, incentivize and think differently. Only through being open-minded we can achieve this.
What I always find encouraging from tech organizations such as Huawei, are their R&D efforts and what they do with it.
As an example, every year, Huawei trains more than 70,000 people, and develop and verify more than 1,000 solutions with their partners through our OpenLabs. Over the next three years, they will invest 300 million US dollars to support their partners, and train more talent through their ICT Academies and Huawei Authorized Learning Partners.
Huawei Connect Bangkok may be over, but they are now en route to share more insights next month in Dubai and Paris.
In between, Huawei joined InnoTrans 2022 to explore the most efficient ways of Driving Digitalization in Future Rail to Create New Value Together.
During InnoTrans, they hosted the 9th Huawei Global Rail Summit. My insights on that event, next week! Stay tuned.
Let’s continue discovering the impact of technology on our society, because together we are stronger.
Elise Quevedo
Author, Advisor, Storyteller
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