China Power
China looks set to invest heavily in cloud computing. How will firms like Amazon and Microsoft respond?
On a exact trip to Beijing and Shanghai to attend Huawei's analyst summit, Gartner analyst Lydia Long learned that Huawei is planning to become a one-stop-shop ‘cloud computing’ provider. In other words, Huawei will not only be making network equipment, it will be developing infrastructure-as-a-service software (the cloud stack) needed to provide a public ‘cloud’ like Microsoft's Azure or Amazon's EC2.
If Huawei's strategy in obtaining market share for its hardware is any indication, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other public and private cloud providers should prepare to have their pricing model ripped to shreds. In addition, the executives of companies who intend to move their data to the cloud would be well-advised to re-think their cloud service provider requirements, moving beyond the question of who is the lowest cost provider and thinking about who will add security guarantees to their service level agreement. Still, I also wouldn't be surprised if Huawei took the initiative to become the first cloud provider to revolutionize SLAs with exactly that kind of provision, considering that Huawei Symantec LLC is developing secure data storage devices for just such a service.
Huawei isn’t the only Chinese company that's investing heavily in the cloud. Cloud computing has been designated a strategic technology by the Chinese State Council in its 12th Five Year plan and placed under the control of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). MIIT will be funding research and development for SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) models as well as virtualization technology, distributed storage technology, massive data management technology, and other unidentified core technologies. Orient Securities LLC has predicted that by 2015, cloud computing in China will be a 1 trillion yuan market.
According to the US-China Council website, MIIT was created in 2008 and absorbed some functions from other departments including COSTIND (Commission of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense):
‘From COSTIND, MIIT will inherit functions relating to the management of the defence industry, with a scope that covers the national defence department, the China National Space Administration, and certain administrative responsibilities of other major defence-oriented state companies such as the China North Industries Co. and China State Shipbuilding Corp. MIIT will also control weapons research and production in both military establishments and dual-role corporations, as well as R&D and production relating to “defence conversion”—the conversion of military facilities to non-military use.’
Beijing has a dedicated 7,800 square metre industrial area called Cloud Valley that’s home to 10 companies focusing on various aspects of cloud technology such as distributed data centres, cloud servers, thin terminals, cloud storage, cloud operating systems, intelligent knowledge bases, data mining systems, and cloud system integration. Clearly, China has made a serious commitment to cloud computing for the long term. This doesn't portend well for today's private cloud service providers like NetApp or public cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft; especially if buying decisions are made on price.
Jeffrey Carr is an IT security analyst and the author of 'Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld' (O'Reilly Media, 2009). His blog can be found here.
HUAWEI CLOUD has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with COBO SINGAPORE PTE.LTD.
SINGAPORE, Aug. 18, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- HUAWEI CLOUD, the leading cloud service brand under technology giant Huawei, officially announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with COBO, a globally trusted leader in digital asset custody solutions, at a private closed door event.
This partnership between HUAWEI CLOUD and COBO represents a significant milestone in their shared vision to accelerate the adoption and advancement of blockchain technology in Asia. As a major player in the industry, HUAWEI is widely recognized for its comprehensive cloud-based offerings, and together with COBO's industry-leading digital asset custody technologies, they will deliver a reliable, robust, and highly secure wallet infrastructure - a foundational element of Web3.0.
Drawing upon their respective expertise and extensive networks, HUAWEI CLOUD and COBO will engage in a series of collaborative activities to drive innovation, foster industry-wide collaboration, and contribute to the overall growth and development of the blockchain landscape.
About HUAWEI CLOUD
HUAWEI CLOUD, a leading cloud service provider, leverages Huawei's extensive expertise in ICT infrastructure products and solutions accumulated over more than 30 years. This year, HUAWEI CLOUD unveiled its latest strategy: "everything as a service". This encompasses Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Technology-as-a-Service, and Expertise-as-a-Service. HUAWEI CLOUD aims to empower its customers with the latest innovative technologies in cloud services, data, AI, and more at their fingertips.
Currently, HUAWEI CLOUD offers over 220 cloud services and solutions around the world. In the Asia Pacific region, HUAWEI CLOUD operates local nodes in Singapore, Hong Kong (China), Thailand, and Malaysia. With more than 500 local partners, HUAWEI CLOUD delivers tailored cloud services and solutions to hundreds of customers across more than 10 industries, including Web3, fintech, logistic, media, and others.
For more information please visit: www.huaweicloud.com
About COBO
COBO is a globally trusted leader in digital asset custody solutions. As the world's first omni-custody platform, COBO offers the full spectrum of solutions from full custody, co-managed MPC custody, to fully decentralized custody as well as wallet-as-a-service, advanced DeFi investment tools and an off-exchange settlement network. Trusted by over 500 institutions with billions in assets under custody, COBO inspires confidence in digital asset ownership by enabling safe and efficient management of digital assets and interactions with Web 3. COBO is SOC2 Type 1 and Type 2-compliance-certified and licensed in 5 jurisdictions.
For more information, please visit www.cobo.com
View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/huawei-cloud-and-cobo-establish-partnership-to-drive-transformational-growth-in-blockchain-technology-301904229.html
SOURCE HUAWEI CLOUD
Jay Zhou, Managing Director of Huawei Cloud.
Huawei Cloud is stepping up its focus on innovation as a value proposition to enhance its standing as a cloud for everyone. This emerged at Huawei Eco-Connect Sub-Saharan Africa 2023, in Sandton, where Jay Zhou, MD of Huawei Cloud South Africa, outlined how Huawei Cloud underpins key industries’ transformation and growth.
Zhou said: “In the ICT industry, the cloud is still the future of ICT and the foundation of digital transformation. What has changed over the past year is that more applications are now going to the cloud, including virtual reality, automation and warehousing.
He highlighted Huawei Cloud’s growth over the past year: “Globally, we have increased our global regions, with two new regions in Ireland and Turkey. We increased our global availability zones, which includes the new zone launched in Johannesburg last year,” he said. Huawei Cloud now has 2 800 content delivery nodes (CDNs) – including the new Cape Town CDN, which went online during the first week in July.
Huawei Cloud’s global revenue almost doubled last year, with a more than 40% increase in the number of partners and over 55% increase in the number of developers. Huawei has yet again increased investment in R&D, allocating 25.1% of its total annual revenue in 2022 to R&D. At the end of 2022, over 114 000+ employees, or 55.4% of its workforce, worked in R&D.
“Last year, we spent around USD25 billion on new technologies, new data centres. This is important because this is the reason we can keep innovating in this industry,” he said.
Zhou highlighted Huawei’s own ERP system as an example of the innovation and progress made in the company. “In the past, Huawei’s Oracle ERP system was a very complicated ERP system. It reached its performance limits and couldn’t be expanded. To generate a report on fulfilment would take us around 90 minutes. To overcome these challenges, Huawei decided to develop our own ERP system – MetaERP – and GaussDB distributed relational database. This reduced our reporting time from 90 minutes to 15 seconds, and fulfilment report time from 23 minutes to nine seconds.
“Huawei needed to give the world another choice in ERP, so we will launch this product to market in the near future,” Zhou said.
“In South Africa, we have seen an overall increase and growth across business KPIs – revenue, customer base and number of partners. Our services have also increased in South Africa. A Gartner report released in April this year stated that Huawei Cloud SA is already number three in infrastructure as a service – this is a big milestone for Huawei Cloud, achieved with the support of customers and partners.”
“We remain humble because we still have a long way to go. Some things we won’t change – our position, slogan and value propositions, including our outstanding technology, support levels and value propositions such as training won’t change. However, we are adding innovation to the value we create. Innovation is leading us to the future,” he said.
Cloud innovation for key sectors
“We cover all key industries including fintech, e-commerce, education, media and government. My aim is to build a cloud for everyone, in this market, which is affordable, trusted and innovative,” he said. “We can assist organisations even if they have limited budget or technical capabilities, or they need a partner to develop new solutions with them.”
Huawei’s AI innovations are making waves across sectors, such as its Pangu-Weather AI model, the first AI prediction model to demonstrate higher precision than traditional numerical weather forecast methods. Nature, one of the world's top scientific journals, recently published a paper describing how to develop a precise and accurate global AI weather forecast system based on deep learning using 43 years of data. In scientific trials, the Pangu-Weather model was found to accurately predict in seconds fine-grained meteorological features, including humidity, wind speed, temperature and sea level pressure.
“In government, a very traditional sector, I strongly believe hybrid cloud is the future because of data privacy concerns. Hybrid clouds can provide flexibility to the government. You can select which data to keep in your own data centre, and which data should go to the cloud. Huawei is the only provider that can do both, so we have a huge advantage in the hybrid cloud area,” he said. “We unify the architecture to enable customers to have a unified experience. We already provide a private cloud to SITA and are now busy with the public cloud.”
In education, online education is the future, and it depends on the cloud, he noted. “Concurrency is an important factor in this sector. In a test with Unisa, we reached 30 000 concurrent users writing exams at the same time – a record in South Africa. At UNIZULU, we provided a unique AI anti-cheating system.”
In the media sector, Zhou said Huawei Cloud’s E-cubed model (efficiency, experience and evolution) was driving growth and innovation. Huawei Cloud’s media innovations include rendering farms and high definition, low bitrate technologies to reduce latency in live broadcasts.
In finance and e-commerce, Huawei Cloud works with leading enterprises globally and across Africa to help them scale, overcome challenges and move into new markets.
Huawei helps e-commerce businesses overcome challenges such as flexibility, cost and future-proofing through scalable and secure infrastructure, transparent pricing and in-country support. For fintechs, Huawei Cloud enables scale and profitability, customer acquisition and robust governance, compliance and security across multiple countries.
“My aim is to bring our global innovations as well as global and local support to South Africa, to build a cloud for everyone – all enterprises, SMEs and enterprises in this country,” Zhou concluded.
Dubai, UAE, The Entrepreneurial Nation, an initiative of the UAE Ministry of Economy, announced its partnership with Huawei Cloud to launch the Huawei Cloud Startup Program in the country. The Program seeks to accelerate UAE's startup ecosystem, providing up to $150,000 in vouchers and access to Huawei Cloud ecosystem resources for eligible businesses.
According to the Ministry of Economy, 94% of the total number of companies operating in the country are in the small and medium-sized (SMEs) or startups sector. SMEs provide jobs for more than 86% of the private sector's workforce. In Dubai, 95% of the emirate’s firms consist of SMEs, employing 42% of its workers and accounting for more than 40% of its GDP. The Huawei Cloud Startup Program will leverage Huawei's three decades of ICT and digitalization expertise to support this crucial sector while helping unleash innovation in the UAE and further boosting the country's digitization goals.
In October 2022, the Ministry of Economy launched the second phase of The Entrepreneurial Nation, the comprehensive and one-of-a-kind national project for the development of the UAE’s SMEs and the overall national entrepreneurial landscape. This phase of the project is based on the largest public-private sector partnerships of their kind and aims to develop the tools to foster the culture and practices of entrepreneurship in the UAE.
The Huawei Cloud Startup Program is a global support program to help accelerate technology startups' business growth. Through the Huawei Cloud Startup Program, Huawei will leverage its global expertise and cloud innovations and help startups address challenges associated with funding, technical and commercial resources and connections they need to expand, contributing to the emergence of innovative businesses that can lead the region's digital transformation powered by Huawei Cloud.
Jiawei Liu, CEO of Huawei UAE, said, “Startups and small businesses play a pivotal role in the continuous development of UAE's economy. We are proud to partner with The Entrepreneurial Nation Initiative by the Ministry of Economy, which provides a perfect platform for entities like Huawei to support the growth and development of the SME sector. As a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices, Huawei will be continuously committed to acting as the foundation for the digitalization and development of the UAE.”
With Huawei Cloud, startups can scale their business effortlessly by eliminating high infrastructure costs and limited computing capacity associated with on-premise data centers. Businesses can also gain access to cutting-edge technologies and resources at a fraction of the cost.
Further, participating entrepreneurs can tap into Huawei's extensive ecosystem, with access to its vast innovations, technical support, mentorship, and market development opportunities. Huawei also provides go-to-market assistance, ensuring small business owners can reach their target audience effectively. Recognizing that collaboration is crucial to growth, Huawei Cloud also helps connect founders with like-minded entrepreneurs, industry experts, and thought leaders worldwide.
Huawei Cloud Startup Program is a global success story. Intella is a two-year-old Egyptian startup that has developed a highly accurate Arabic voice-to-text transcription engine, encompassing all the 25 Arab dialects and whose model was trained and optimized on Huawei Cloud ModelArts. Through the Huawei Cloud Startup Program, Intella received cloud credits worth tens of thousands of US dollars for AI model training in addition to co-marketing and co-selling with Huawei Cloud's Egypt team to scale up its solution commercially.
Bright, a leading Thai-based digital school management platform, is another successful story facilitated by Huawei Cloud Startup Program. After joining the Program, it took advantage of Huawei Cloud ecosystem resources, leveraging Huawei's multi-industry resources, opening new opportunities through joint innovation with large enterprises, and has since grown rapidly in terms of investment, client base and team. Today, Bright is Thailand's largest education tech startup with over 400,000 students and 20,000 teachers and available in over 500 Schools. It plans an IPO in the next three years.
Huawei Cloud is the fastest-growing cloud services provider in the world with an expanding list of services, including Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), cloud database, cloud security, software development services, and scenario-based solutions. By 2022, Huawei Cloud had launched more than 200 products and 200 solutions, established more than 2,800 nodes worldwide, covering more than 170 countries and regions and had more than 9000 technical partners, with more than 100 global certifications and over 3,000,000 customers globally.
-Ends-
About Huawei
Founded in 1987, Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. We have more than 207,000 employees, and we operate in more than 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world.
Our Vision and mission is to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. To this end, we will drive ubiquitous connectivity and promote equal access to networks; bring cloud and artificial intelligence to all four corners of the earth to provide superior computing power where you need it, when you need it; build digital platforms to help all industries and organizations become more agile, efficient, and dynamic; redefine user experience with AI, making it more personalized for people in all aspects of their life, whether they're at home, in the office, or on the go.
For more information, please visit Huawei online at:
www.huawei.com
https://e.huawei.com/ae/
or follow us on:
http://www.linkedin.com/company/Huawei
https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/huawei-enterprise
http://www.twitter.com/Huawei
http://www.facebook.com/Huawei
http://www.youtube.com/Huawei
Middle East:
https://www.facebook.com/HuaweiTechME
https://twitter.com/Huawei_ME
HUAWEI CLOUD has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with COBO SINGAPORE PTE.LTD.
SINGAPORE, Aug. 18, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- HUAWEI CLOUD, the leading cloud service brand under technology giant Huawei, officially announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with COBO, a globally trusted leader in digital asset custody solutions, at a private closed door event.
This partnership between HUAWEI CLOUD and COBO represents a significant milestone in their shared vision to accelerate the adoption and advancement of blockchain technology in Asia. As a major player in the industry, HUAWEI is widely recognized for its comprehensive cloud-based offerings, and together with COBO's industry-leading digital asset custody technologies, they will deliver a reliable, robust, and highly secure wallet infrastructure - a foundational element of Web3.0.
Drawing upon their respective expertise and extensive networks, HUAWEI CLOUD and COBO will engage in a series of collaborative activities to drive innovation, foster industry-wide collaboration, and contribute to the overall growth and development of the blockchain landscape.
About HUAWEI CLOUD
HUAWEI CLOUD, a leading cloud service provider, leverages Huawei's extensive expertise in ICT infrastructure products and solutions accumulated over more than 30 years. This year, HUAWEI CLOUD unveiled its latest strategy: "everything as a service". This encompasses Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Technology-as-a-Service, and Expertise-as-a-Service. HUAWEI CLOUD aims to empower its customers with the latest innovative technologies in cloud services, data, AI, and more at their fingertips.
Currently, HUAWEI CLOUD offers over 220 cloud services and solutions around the world. In the Asia Pacific region, HUAWEI CLOUD operates local nodes in Singapore, Hong Kong (China), Thailand, and Malaysia. With more than 500 local partners, HUAWEI CLOUD delivers tailored cloud services and solutions to hundreds of customers across more than 10 industries, including Web3, fintech, logistic, media, and others.
For more information please visit: www.huaweicloud.com
About COBO
COBO is a globally trusted leader in digital asset custody solutions. As the world's first omni-custody platform, COBO offers the full spectrum of solutions from full custody, co-managed MPC custody, to fully decentralized custody as well as wallet-as-a-service, advanced DeFi investment tools and an off-exchange settlement network. Trusted by over 500 institutions with billions in assets under custody, COBO inspires confidence in digital asset ownership by enabling safe and efficient management of digital assets and interactions with Web 3. COBO is SOC2 Type 1 and Type 2-compliance-certified and licensed in 5 jurisdictions.
For more information, please visit www.cobo.com
