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Huawei Eco Connect outlines the path to the hyper-connected world

SPONSORED: At Huawei's recent annual Eco Connect event at the Sandton Convention Centre, the company outlined what it considers the 'road to digital transformation'.

SPONSORED: Alex Du Min, MD of Huawei Enterprise SA, told delegates that the company’s strategy for 2019 centres around collaboration with partners and customers, in order to develop innovative and leading industry-specific solutions. These, he adds, will enable flexible, open, and secure platforms to drive enterprise digital transformation.

“Huawei’s own digital transformation journey has been ongoing for a number of years already, and has reached the point where it is integral to driving our business growth. A good example of digitisation in action is how the global business has seen its revenue grow from $60 billion to over $100 billion, yet our employee numbers barely changed, increasing from 175 000 to 180 000. Furthermore, we have reduced the rollout time of applications from several months to just a few weeks, and our inventory cycle time from seven days to just over one day,” he says.

Muhammed Seedat, a director at Huawei Technologies explained to delegates that Huawei believes that cloud is the foundation that will power and propel the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), so the company has built its own vision and strategy around the cloud, based on the simple premise of becoming one of the top five cloud providers globally.

“Leveraging our 30 years of B2B experience and our growing knowledge of digital transformation, we have created solutions for both enterprise and government, and have developed an intelligent cloud that utilises artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities built into the platform,” he says.

“Furthermore, Huawei became the first cloud service provider to have an operational datacentre situated here in South Africa, which offers users a local presence across the country, with latency of less than 40 milliseconds. This, in turn, opens the door for new cloud-hosted companies to enter the SA market, which should lead to increased competition, better services and a new ecosystem everyone can leverage to drive their own digital transformation journeys.”

Eco Connect 2019 also witnessed the company announcing a series of star products and solutions, with Morgan Maylon, Huawei product manager, outlining how the new Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage offers both reliability and high performance to the enterprise business market.

“The industry's first datacentre switch built specifically for the AI era – the CloudEngine 16800 – offers an embedded AI chip and makes use of the innovative iLossless algorithm to achieve an AI computing power of 100%, thereby improving data storage IOPS by some 30%,” he explains.

“The third product range is Huawei’s software-defined cameras, which can be applied in a wide variety of security scenarios, including face checkpoint, situation awareness, vehicle checkpoint and Intelligent Transportation Surveillance (ITS). The software-defined camera supports continuous evolution and development of algorithms and applications, while the open-ended platform enables AI to be applied in more security scenarios.”

The last solution, Huawei’s WiFi 6 AP, was outlined by Ajay Gupta, the company’s director for product marketing and management.

“We believe that WiFi should be a fundamental birthright, and that connectivity should be considered one of the key human rights in the modern world. WiFi 6 will take us a step closer to this ideal, as it sees the evolution of WiFi use cases moving from small office and consumer environments to a much larger playing field – encompassing stadiums, airports, large offices, smart factories and colleges,” he says.

“WiFi 6 is the new name for 802.11 AX, and offers high capacity and high bandwidth, coupled with very low latency. Huawei believes that this year is the one where WiFi 6 will become reality, although it may still take a few more to become fully accepted and utilised across industries. With data transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps, which will drive better content and a richer experience, WiFi 6 is not something you should ignore. Instead, you should be viewing it from the point of view of what it can do for your digital transformation journey, and how it can assist you in embracing the new hyper-connected world,” he concludes.