Huawei Enters Public Cloud Arena

Chinese tech giant Huawei has the likes of Amazon and Alibaba in its sights after revealing plans to strengthen its commitment to the cloud and become a leading global provider of public cloud services.

The strategy involves recruiting an extra 2,000 people and spinning off a separate cloud business unit to add to the company’s existing Carrier, Consumer (devices) and Enterprise groups.

Amazon is currently the market leader in the space, while fellow Chinese firm Alibaba Cloud will provide stern competition closer to home. Huawei  will also have to compete with new entrant Dalian Wanda Group, formed in partnership with IBM.

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Speaking at Huawei’s Global Analyst Summit in Shenzhen, Zheng Yelai – president of the new group said: “We used to focus on private cloud and did well. Now the purpose is to strengthen our public cloud offering.”

Rotating CEO Eric Xu said that Huawei will look to “build upon our advantages accumulated over the years”, specifically the company’s strong presence in developing countries and carrier partnerships in Europe.

He added that Huawei will aim to “compete and coexist with AWS and Microsoft” in the market and will focus on “our telecom partners’ cloud transformation”.

Although a bold move, it could also be a timely one. Gartner has predicted that the public cloud services market will rise from $247 billion (£198bn) this year to $383 billion (£308bn) by 2020

Spend on cloud compute services will also increase significantly over the next three years, nearly trebling in size from $23.3 billion (£18.7bn) in 2016 to $68.4 billion (£54.9bn) in 2020.

This week’s news comes hot on the heels of Huawei’s strong showing at CeBIT 2017 in Germany, where it unveiled a cloud architecture designed to help businesses along their digital transformation journeys.

Before that it released a cloud integrated security gateway product for enterprises and has since partnered with Canonical to simplify cloud network management.

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