SINGAPORE, Aug. 16, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei Cloud is seeing incredible momentum in the Asia Pacific region. In a accurate Caijing megazine interview, Mr. Zeng Xingyun, President of Huawei Cloud Asia Pacific, shared some impressive growth numbers. He said that over just the past four years, Huawei's public cloud services in Southeast Asia have grown by an astounding 20 times, making Huawei one of the fastest growing clouds in the region. How did Huawei Cloud achieved this level of success in such a competitive landscape and become the cloud of choice for many Chinese enterprises to go global? Let's start with digits. According to IDC, Huawei Cloud ranks No. 4 in the public cloud IaaS market in Southeast Asia, with a market share of 3.5%, the top among Chinese cloud vendors.
Mr. Zeng holds that there are a few factors that have driven their rapid growth.
First, the customer-centric approach - putting customer needs above all else. The Southeast Asian market values innovative software and services, and Huawei tailors their offerings according to each customer's specific requirements. There is no one-size-fits-all solution or business model. Truly understanding customers and delivering what they want pave the way to success for Huawei.
Cloud infrastructure is also a strategic priority for Huawei. They have made strategic investments in expanding their data center coverage across the region. Currently, Huawei Cloud leads the pack with the most Availability Zones (AZs) in Southeast Asia — a total of 14 across 11 countries (Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Brunei, and Timor-Leste). In addition, Huawei Cloud has four data center AZs in Hong Kong, China and plans to launch three more in Manila in December this year. By then, Huawei Cloud will have 21 data center AZs in Southeast Asia, the highest number among cloud service providers.
Mr. Zeng also emphasized the importance of long-term commitment to customers. Building brand and trust takes dedication over time, and relies on successful delivery. There is no shortcut to the success of B2B business. Huawei focuses on continually meeting promises, serving customer needs, and boosting their competitiveness in solutions and services, localized cloud infrastructure, and industry ecosystems. This ongoing customer-centric approach has earned Huawei Cloud a large customer base across local industries such as government and public sectors, IT, Internet cloud media, retail, culture, tourism, real estate, finance, banking, credit, and gaming. With extensive experience in industry digital transformation, in Thailand, Huawei cloud was the first to launch a local cloud Region, has 29.4% IaaS market share according to Gartner, and has won the national government cloud project. Major customers there include SCB Bank (Thailand's second largest commercial bank), BBTV (Thailand's largest TV station), Siriraj Hospital (Thailand's largest public hospital), and MONOMAX (popular video streaming platform in Thailand).
Ecosystem partners are also crucial to Huawei Cloud. Huawei features developing partnerships based on customer needs. While focusing on IaaS and general PaaS services, Huawei Cloud aims to be neutral. As a longtime provider across Asia Pacific's government, enterprise and carrier sectors, Huawei Cloud complements application software providers as well. Mr. Zeng shared that Huawei Cloud ecosystem partners in Southeast Asia are classified into global, local, and Chinese ones. Customer needs always steer ecosystem cooperation and benefit sharing. According to IDC, Huawei Cloud leads in IaaS market share among Chinese vendors in Southeast Asia. It has become the cloud of choice for Chinese enterprises to go global.
In Asia Pacific, for Asia Pacific. Compliance also remains a top priority, ranked above commercial interests. Mr. Zeng said Huawei cannot stress enough on compliance. Huawei is also ready to become a major contributor to the digital economy in Asia Pacific. Huawei has cultivated more than 70,000 digital talent for Asia Pacific through projects such as ASEAN Academy and ICT Academy in 2022. Around 120 startups in places like Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia are supported via Huawei Cloud startup programs.
Strong local support is another key. With over 20 years in local markets, Huawei assists established government, enterprise, and carrier customers through professional local teams, while developing Internet service providers into cloud native adopters. Four regional service centers and 170+ local centers provide 24/7 multilingual support.
Looking ahead, Mr. Zeng said Huawei Cloud will remain customer-centric in Southeast Asia, and keep improving competitiveness and creating value locally through partnerships and tailored services. "In local, for local". Huawei Cloud aims to have the longest-running and fastest-growing cloud presence in the region.
China Power
China looks set to invest heavily in cloud computing. How will firms like Amazon and Microsoft respond?
On a accurate 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.
Shaping the Future beyond Chatbots: Huawei focuses on AI's Impact on Industry Transformation
DONGGUAN, China, July 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei is bringing forth new industry opportunities and technological advancements driven by the AI wave. During his keynote speech at Huawei's Developer Conference, Zhang Ping'an, Huawei Executive Director and CEO of HUAWEI CLOUD, unveiled the Pangu Model 3.0 and Ascend AI cloud services. These innovations aim to empower industry customers and partners and unlock the potential of artificial intelligence for transformative growth across a range of sectors.
Mr. Zhang said: "Huawei Cloud Pangu models will empower everyone from every industry with an intelligent assistant, making them more productive and efficient."
Pangu Models 3.0 is a system of pre-trained models that can be quickly adapted to meet scenario-specific needs and address complex challenges across multiple industries. By leveraging large-scale data sets and machine learning algorithms, Pangu 3.0 is set to revolutionize the industrial application of AI in diverse areas such as weather forecasting, drug development, fault identification in trains, and the mining industry.
Mr. Zhang said: "Huawei Cloud Pangu models will empower everyone from every industry with an intelligent assistant, making them more productive and efficient. We will uphold our mission of "AI for Industries", and use Pangu models to reshape all industries with AI."
Prestigious science journal Nature recently published a paper describing the enormous potential that artificial intelligence holds for weather prediction. The paper described how Huawei's Pangu Weather AI Model team developed a precise and accurate global AI weather forecast system based on deep learning using 43 years of data.
Pangu Weather is the first AI prediction model to demonstrate higher precision than traditional numerical weather forecast methods. The model allows a 10,000x improvement in prediction speed, reducing global weather prediction time to just seconds. The model focuses on key elements and common time ranges, allowing for more precise weather forecasts. Notably, it has accurately predicted the trajectories and landing times of typhoons, including the accurate Typhoon Mawar in May this year, demonstrating its exceptional capabilities.
On July 18, Huawei and Shandong Energy Group will jointly launch the first commercial case of Pangu Mining Model in Jinan, Shandong province. It is a ground-breaking solution that will enhance safety, efficiency, and productivity. Traditional mining operations are inherently risky, requiring extensive manpower and posing significant technical and safety challenges. However, with the implementation of digital technologies, augmented by the Pangu Mining Model, the industry is witnessing a transformative shift. By importing massive amounts of data for model pre-training, the Pangu Mining Model enables unsupervised self-learning, covering over 300 core scenarios in coal mining operations. From digging and drivage to machinery, transport, and communication, the model streamlines AI applications in numerous coal mining scenarios.
Transportation system failures in coal mines are a significant issue, resulting in decreased coal output and financial losses. Addressing this challenge, Huawei's Pangu Mining Model incorporates an AI-based intelligent monitoring system that accurately identifies exceptions in the transportation system, such as large coal blocks and anchors, with an exceptional accuracy rate of up to 98%.
The railway industry also benefits immensely from Huawei's AI advancements. Through the implementation of the Pangu Railway Model, the safety and efficiency of freight trains are significantly improved. Previous fault identification processes within Train Freight Detection Systems (TFDS) have been labour-intensive, inefficient, and costly. On railways, the Pangu Railway Model can accurately identify 67 types of freight cars and over 430 types of faults found on railways and freight cars. It can quickly scan millions of images captured by the railway TFDS system and filter out 95% of the images that are fault-free. This way, train inspectors can focus on the remaining images, and this helps them Strengthen both efficiency and accuracy.
These case studies exemplify the transformative power of AI in industrial applications. By harnessing the capabilities of Huawei's Pangu 3.0 and Ascend AI cloud services, businesses can unlock new levels of safety, efficiency, and productivity, driving substantial growth and competitive advantage in their respective industries. Huawei's commitment to innovation and the development of advanced AI solutions underscores its commitment to providing cutting edge solutions for customers.
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
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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 deliver 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.
Shaping the Future beyond Chatbots: Huawei focuses on AI's Impact on Industry Transformation
DONGGUAN, China, July 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei is bringing forth new industry opportunities and technological advancements driven by the AI wave. During his keynote speech at Huawei's Developer Conference, Zhang Ping'an, Huawei Executive Director and CEO of HUAWEI CLOUD, unveiled the Pangu Model 3.0 and Ascend AI cloud services. These innovations aim to empower industry customers and partners and unlock the potential of artificial intelligence for transformative growth across a range of sectors.
Mr. Zhang said: "Huawei Cloud Pangu models will empower everyone from every industry with an intelligent assistant, making them more productive and efficient."
Pangu Models 3.0 is a system of pre-trained models that can be quickly adapted to meet scenario-specific needs and address complex challenges across multiple industries. By leveraging large-scale data sets and machine learning algorithms, Pangu 3.0 is set to revolutionize the industrial application of AI in diverse areas such as weather forecasting, drug development, fault identification in trains, and the mining industry.
Mr. Zhang said: "Huawei Cloud Pangu models will empower everyone from every industry with an intelligent assistant, making them more productive and efficient. We will uphold our mission of "AI for Industries", and use Pangu models to reshape all industries with AI."
Prestigious science journal Nature recently published a paper describing the enormous potential that artificial intelligence holds for weather prediction. The paper described how Huawei's Pangu Weather AI Model team developed a precise and accurate global AI weather forecast system based on deep learning using 43 years of data.
Pangu Weather is the first AI prediction model to demonstrate higher precision than traditional numerical weather forecast methods. The model allows a 10,000x improvement in prediction speed, reducing global weather prediction time to just seconds. The model focuses on key elements and common time ranges, allowing for more precise weather forecasts. Notably, it has accurately predicted the trajectories and landing times of typhoons, including the accurate Typhoon Mawar in May this year, demonstrating its exceptional capabilities.
On July 18, Huawei and Shandong Energy Group will jointly launch the first commercial case of Pangu Mining Model in Jinan, Shandong province. It is a ground-breaking solution that will enhance safety, efficiency, and productivity. Traditional mining operations are inherently risky, requiring extensive manpower and posing significant technical and safety challenges. However, with the implementation of digital technologies, augmented by the Pangu Mining Model, the industry is witnessing a transformative shift. By importing massive amounts of data for model pre-training, the Pangu Mining Model enables unsupervised self-learning, covering over 300 core scenarios in coal mining operations. From digging and drivage to machinery, transport, and communication, the model streamlines AI applications in numerous coal mining scenarios.
Transportation system failures in coal mines are a significant issue, resulting in decreased coal output and financial losses. Addressing this challenge, Huawei's Pangu Mining Model incorporates an AI-based intelligent monitoring system that accurately identifies exceptions in the transportation system, such as large coal blocks and anchors, with an exceptional accuracy rate of up to 98%.
The railway industry also benefits immensely from Huawei's AI advancements. Through the implementation of the Pangu Railway Model, the safety and efficiency of freight trains are significantly improved. Previous fault identification processes within Train Freight Detection Systems (TFDS) have been labour-intensive, inefficient, and costly. On railways, the Pangu Railway Model can accurately identify 67 types of freight cars and over 430 types of faults found on railways and freight cars. It can quickly scan millions of images captured by the railway TFDS system and filter out 95% of the images that are fault-free. This way, train inspectors can focus on the remaining images, and this helps them Strengthen both efficiency and accuracy.
These case studies exemplify the transformative power of AI in industrial applications. By harnessing the capabilities of Huawei's Pangu 3.0 and Ascend AI cloud services, businesses can unlock new levels of safety, efficiency, and productivity, driving substantial growth and competitive advantage in their respective industries. Huawei's commitment to innovation and the development of advanced AI solutions underscores its commitment to providing cutting edge solutions for customers.
