Kathy Gibson reports from the Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai – Huawei Technologies intends for its cloud offerings to be a major part of its business going forward, and believes it has the right mix of technologies to succeed in this market.
Ron Raffensperger, chief technology officer: IT solution sales at Huawei Technologies, points out that the company has a long and successful history in the telecommunications world, and brings these value-adds to the enterprise market.
He says the cloud market has a number of different complexions:
* Telecommunications networks re beginning to look like clouds. “Network function virtualisation is transforming the switches in the telco network into software that can dynamically change the network as required. This decreases costs and increases flexibility,” Raffensperger says.
* In the enterprise world, organisations has virtualised to reduce their server footprint, but still use the public network with different technologies. “There are now new ways of thinking about things like bandwidth, switching and scale.”
* Communications and IT are coming together, making ICT a reality. “But there is a lot of confusion about this,” Raffensperger says. “Everything is packets now. You used to have separate voice and data networks, but now it’s all just packets. We believe the cloud and ICT are disruptive influences that can allow us to go into a market we weren’t in before.”
Raffensperger believes that one of the keys to Huawei’s success in the cloud market is the fact that it’s approaching it from the telecommunications world, and so understands about the scale that cloud computing will require.
“Most of our competitors are coming from the enterprise side,” he says. “Because we are approaching from the telecommunications point of view, we understand about scale and multi-tenancy; also about how to get big and how to stay protected.
“We think we’ll do well because we understand how networks work, and how people are going to use the networks. In this environment, hybrid cloud becomes important: the customer is going to want some services on-premise, some on the public network and some that he rents. We are trying to help companies have one way of managing this whole set-up.
“So we are coming at the market from the other side to what our competitors are doing, with all the benefits of our telecommunications experience.”
Raffensperger adds that, in many ways, the same trends are apparent in the telecommunications networks as well, with silos starting to collapse. “We are seeing the opportunities in the convergence of these trends, and believe we are well placed with our skills set.”
Another element in its favour is that fact that Huawei’s technology is based on software, so it’s able to respond to market needs relatively quickly. It’s also able to customise solutions that suit a customer’s specific needs if necessary, adding agility and focus into the enterprise market.
“Long ago, we put in place a software management system that can handle multiple streams and bring them together, so we solved that problem a while back,” Raffensberger says.
In addition, the company complies with OpenStack standards, so it can integrate hardware and applications from third party vendors as well.
“We have done a lot to be very open and standards-based, so customers can deploy our technology without worrying about it,” he says.
Huawei uses its own technology internally, and currently runs a cloud computing environment that includes 2 000 virtual machines.
