Digital Transformation: How Huawei Assists Fortune Global 500 Companies
Recently I attended HUAWEI CONNECT 2017 in Shanghai. It was my fourth trip to China in the past year. I love Chinese culture. The people embrace new technologies and are excited about innovation and possibilities. There’s a palpable feeling that we’re in a new ICT era, and digital transformation is more important than ever.
I understand firsthand why China is considered a tech and innovation powerhouse. In July, CNBC reported that China is experiencing “innovation after innovation.”
Huawei has reached several milestones over the past several months. For example, in July 2017, Huawei entered the Fortune 100 at number 83. It’s an impressive feat for a 30-year-old startup from Shenzhen.
Huawei has experienced robust growth over the past few years, and in 2016, their Enterprise business group experienced the most growth with an increase of 47%. You can view the entire annual report for more detail.
I had a full schedule at HUAWEI CONNECT, but I found a few hours to meander the exhibition floor. As I talked and interviewed people from all over the world, there seemed to be one common theme — and it focused on Huawei’s Enterprise business.
With the establishment of Huawei’s Enterprise business in 2011, the goal has always been to help organizations make a digital transformation. Over the past 6 years, Huawei’s Enterprise business has become increasingly competitive.
Their 6 years of “fast lane” development has paid off. Now, Huawei helps the world’s top Fortune Global 500 companies and industry-leading partners and customers complete their digital transformation.
In this post, I will focus on the current trends in the ICT market, and the latest status of Huawei’s Enterprise business. I would also like to share some Huawei digital transformation success stories that show how their Enterprise business model and strategy works time and time again.
As Enterprise Digital Transformation Accelerates, Fortune Global 500 Companies Become the Trendsetters
According to Diana Yuan, President of Marketing and Solution Sales Department of Huawei’s Enterprise business group, Fortune Global 500 companies become the trendsetters.
197 out of the top 500 companies have chosen to partner with Huawei — and 45 out of the top 100 companies have chosen to partner with Huawei. You can see a short list of Huawei customers and partners in the image below.
According to Huawei, enterprises are increasingly focused on digital transformation as a competitive advantage. Many Fortune Global 500 companies across a wide range of industries are at a tipping point of this transition. Their challenges now are not on why enterprises need digital transformation but on how and when to do that.
Why are Fortune Global 500 companies choosing Huawei to help complete their digital transformation and how they are undergoing the transition?
There are 4 ways Huawei has been able to differentiate from other ICT vendors.
1. Huawei’s Technology Competitiveness and Global Services Capability
Huawei is a one-stop ICT provider. They have a complete portfolio of solutions. Its ICT solutions, products, and services are used in more than 170 countries and regions, serving over one-third of the world’s population.
At HUAWEI CONNECT 2017, Huawei revealed its latest enterprise service strategy designed to support companies undergoing cloud transformation by investing USD 500 million in the development of cloud-based professional services, a cloud platform and cloud ecosystem.
This will provide customers with end-to-end cloud transformation service solutions enabling them to build, use, and manage their cloud platforms effectively.
2. Analysis of Institutional Ranking and Results of External Analysis
According to Gartner, Huawei has emerged as the world’s third largest server distributor (to surpass Lenovo). As of the first quarter of 2017, Huawei storage services served 7,000 corporate customers globally, equal to the sixth-largest market share in the world.
IDC reported that Huawei’s data center switches ranked first in market share in China in 2016. In June, Huawei was also listed on Forbes Most Valuable Brands of 2017 (number 88). It’s the only Chinese brand on the list.
3. Business Innovation and Leadership
For enterprises undergoing digital transformation, no single technology alone can achieve this. New ICT technologies like Cloud Computing, IoT, Big Data, Mobile Broadband and SDN will govern the digital transformation. Among these technologies, Cloud Computing is the core.
Huawei’s platform is a cloud-pipe-device collaboration full-stack ICT platform with IT and CT technologies convergence. There are very few companies that truly possess cloud-pipe-device full-stack ICT capabilities and Huawei is one of them.
This allows all-in-one ICT services for customers and partners. The upper layer platform does not need to bother with the lower layer’s complex software and hardware systems. That means developers and solution providers can focus on their own service optimization and innovation.
At HUAWEI CONNECT 2017 in Shanghai, we heard firsthand how Huawei’s leading new ICT helps enterprise digital transformation from its press conference, workshops and keynotes. The success stories comprised a myriad of vertical industry solutions and case studies.
Here is a list of those companies: (You can click on the links to read their stories in digital transformation with Huawei and its partners)
- SAP: Huawei and SAP have formed a long-term global technology partnership to improve the SAP HANA platform for enterprise customers. The platform is currently in use by thousands of customers worldwide.
- Honeywell: Huawei worked with Honeywell to build a smart building — Australia’s Brisbane Skytower . The Skytower is also a model of smart buildings created through the cooperation between Huawei and Honeywell. Huawei and Honeywell worked together to create this smart building solution. It is based on Huawei’s edge computing IoT platform and combines Honeywell’s smart building management system, fully integrating ICT platform capabilities with industry experience. This allows for the complex and diverse devices in a building to connect and work among themselves. Using 10 million-level IoT terminal cloud management reduces operations and management costs by 60% and power consumption by 50%.
- China Everbright Bank (CEB): China Everbright Bank chose Huawei FusionCube to Build a Converged Architecture Resource Pool. This solution allows CEB to greatly reduce the scale of branch IT infrastructures, comprehensively improve resource delivery efficiency, and build standard procedures for resource delivery.
- Thailand’s Provincial Electric Power Company: Huawei’s Unified Transmission Solution assists PEA’s services to evolve towards IP.
- Dubai International Airport: Huawei partners with Dubai Airports to build a prefabricated modular data center with Tier III certificates from the Uptime Institute for both design and construction. The data center can ensure an availability of 99.98% and an annual downtime within 1.6 hours. The data center provides a stable cornerstone of a Smart Airport.
- DHL: DHL Supply Chain and Huawei are developing a range of supply chain solutions for customers using industrial-grade Internet of Things (IoT) hardware and infrastructure. They collaborate on innovation projects focusing on cellular-based Internet of Things technology, which can connect large volumes of devices across long distances with minimal power consumption. The greater connectivity will deliver a more integrated logistics value chain by providing critical data and visibility into warehousing operations, freight transportation, and last-mile delivery.
- Schindler: Huawei helps Schindler ahead in the software-defined elevator. Based on Huawei’s IoT and edge computing, it enables remote monitoring, real-time analysis, and predictive maintenance for elevators, which reduces downtime and ensures a superior passenger experience.
- Dongfeng Motor: Huawei customizes the Desktop Cloud Solution for Dongfeng Communication, improving its incident response speed, trouble-shooting efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
- France TF1: Huawei’s media cloud enables TF1 to provide HD video streams for clients. The whole process requires no advanced client devices or powerful, HPN-based back-office support abilities.
- OFO: Based on NB-IoT technology, ofo developed an IoT smart lock that lowers power consumption, enables wide coverage and heavy connections, and slashes system resource delays at low cost.
4. Huawei’s Differentiation and its Unique Advantages: Its “Platform + Ecosystem” strategy
According Yan Lida’s speech (he’s the President of Huawei Enterprise Business), Huawei’s differentiation has 3 characteristics -
1. Huawei’s commercial model chooses to rely on the monetization of technology and services, it does not monetize user data. This is the biggest difference between Huawei and traditional Internet companies, like Google, Alibaba, Tencent…… because Huawei wants to become their customers’ most trusted digital partner.
2. The second feature of the Huawei platform is that Huawei abides by their own business boundaries. They are committed to becoming a platform for the platform. There are many companies that through their own experience in a specific industry have transformed into an enabler platform for that industry. It is very common to see this in companies such as GE, which is now providing an industrial cloud platform for the aviation and manufacturing industries. Huawei believes that it must create an open, secure, and reliable ICT infrastructure platform within their business boundaries to become the platform for their customers and partners’ platforms.
3. Huawei is committed to becoming the ecosystem’s soil to help customers grow quickly. So its plan for developers is called the ‘Developer Enablement Plan.’ Huawei has its own operating institutions in over 170 countries around the world. Apart from a technical platform, another very important platform is one that faces global ‘marketing and services’. The solutions that Huawei create with its partners can make use of this platform to be rolled out quickly.
For example, In the Safe City domain, Hexagon is a leading ISV that has CAD, geographic sensors, GIS, and other professional technologies. Huawei and Hexagon’s advantages complement each other, creating a new-generation converged command system. In the past two years, their joint marketing helps to expand their market from developed countries to developing countries in the South Pacific area, the Middle East, Latin America, and others. Hexagon’s income doubled the original in these countries.
Huawei is also a vendor that will innovate along with you. The Huawei Global OpenLab Program fosters the innovation of this open ecosystem. OpenLabs will enable Huawei to work with various industry partners across the world to create customer-centric and innovative solutions that enable digital transformation, while promoting industry ecosystem development. And Huawei is investing USD200M to develop 15 new OpenLabs in 3 years.
Huawei’s products and solutions combined with their collaborative ecosystem facilitate digital transformation for leading enterprises. As an innovation-oriented company, Huawei is also speeding up its own digital transformation strategy. It will share its transformation best practices with the industry.
What’s Next?
Last year, I wrote about the 3 Phases of ICT Transformation. We are currently in the third phase, which is all about vertical industries. Within the next decade, traditional industries will enter a critical point of digital transformation.
It’s this growth that will drive innovation. These new technologies are changing how we live our lives — and the cloud is key for the success of enterprise digitalization. To meet these growing demands, Huawei has launched several industry-leading ICT products and solutions.
For example, just last month at HUAWEI CONNECT in Shanghai, Huawei released 6 innovative solutions. These innovations are in hardware, software, data, connection, architecture and hybrid cloud.
Huawei is dedicated to becoming their customers’ most trusted partner, a platform for platforms, and the ecosystem’s soil as more and more customers and partners align themselves with this development concept. Currently, the Huawei platform already has over 400 solution partners, 2,400 service partners, 12,000 channel partners, and over 80,000 registered developers.
Huawei has proven itself to be a leader in this new ICT era as it continues to work with Fortune Global 500 enterprises to complete their digital transformation. We are living in exciting times, and it’s a thrill to watch the world as it transitions through this technology metamorphosis.
Thank you for reading my blog post. I’d love to know your thoughts about Huawei’s digital transformation strategy. To continue the conversation, tweet me at @adamsconsulting or visit Leading New ICT, The Road to Digital Transformation.
