Unleash Digital: Empowering Enterprises and Creating Value

On Day 2 of Huawei Connect 2022, Ryan Ding, President of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group, gave a keynote speech on the technologies, solutions, and partnerships that are helping enterprises go digital and ramping up productivity and efficiency across industries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we work and live. To handle the resulting uncertainties, companies are investing to accelerate digital transformation.

According to third-party research, the global digital economy grew by 15.6% in 2021. The number of companies that have a digital transformation strategy was up 42% from two years ago. Enterprise direct investment in digital transformation is set to grow at 16.5% per year between 2022 and 2024.

Deeper digital transformation can help companies better deal with uncertainties.

So how do companies deepen their digital transformation?

That depends on the industry and the specific scenario. For example, throughout the pandemic, traffic at airports has changed like a pulse wave. When work resumes after a lockdown, we see a surge in electricity usage. Once we can identify these needs, we need to find the right technologies to address them.

Let me give you an example: In the past, power line inspectors had to walk dozens of kilometers a day carrying 10-kilogram backpacks, which was both hard and dangerous. At one power grid, engineers inspected nearly one million kilometers of power lines each year, equivalent to walking 25 times around the Earth. And many power lines run through areas with no access to electricity, networks, or fiber.

To support such work, Huawei uses a combination of technologies, including solar-powered systems, optical ground wires, microwave, and Wi-Fi. Now engineers can inspect power lines remotely without leaving the office. With these technologies, power-line inspections are 80 times faster and engineers can work more safely.

Innovations in connectivity, computing, and cloud technologies

Huawei’s innovations in these areas are designed to achieve three goals:

• First, build intelligent connectivity using optical, data communications, and wireless technologies.
• Second, redefine computing using data storage and diversified computing technologies.
• Third, build intelligent cloud infrastructure that supports industries.

With this infrastructure in place, we then work with our partners to dive deep into different scenarios and create value for customers. That includes remote control for cranes at ports, the exploration and development of oil and gas, and converged campus networks.

Finding the right technology for the right scenario is how we maintain continuous innovation in our industry.

Huawei has 100,000 R&D engineers. In 2021, we invested 22.4 billion US dollars in R&D, bringing our total investment over the last decade to 132.5 billion US dollars.

Thanks to this huge investment, we have created many cutting-edge technologies in connectivity, computing, and cloud. For example:

• Using the iLossless algorithm, we developed CloudEngine, the industry’s only data center switch with zero packet loss.
• Our AirEngine AP series uses the industry’s only air interface slicing technology, to provide signal control channels with five-nines availability.
• We used full optical switching and optical backplanes to develop an all-optical switching architecture that reduces physical size by 90% and power consumption by 60%.
• Our OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage uses the industry’s only fully interconnected architecture and SAN/NAS, active-active disaster recovery solution to deliver seven-nines availability.

Finding the right solution

Complex issues are hard to resolve with a single technology. The right solution always requires the synergy of multiple technologies.

3D medical imaging can produce 3,000 images at a time. As the amount of data in these images is equivalent to a two-hour Blu-ray movie, handling such a huge amount of data is a big challenge.

To address this problem, Huawei uses a combination of products, such as storage, switches, optical devices, and Wi-Fi 6 products, to provide secure, reliable, low-latency, and high-bandwidth storage and networks. Then with the support of our partner’s software, 3D medical images can be analyzed with extremely low latency.

Before the solution was deployed, it took more than one day to read a 3D medical image. Now, doctors can read the images directly in the system, and patients no longer need to wait.

This is just one example. To date, Huawei has developed 26 product portfolios to support different scenarios.

Complexity requires partnerships

Digital transformation is complex. Huawei works with partners to match technologies to different scenarios.

For example, tunnel safety is traditionally managed by people and relies on their personal experience. But now, emergency response plans are generated automatically, with coordinated control just one click away.

Huawei has developed a smart tunnel solution together with our partners. Huawei provides connectivity technologies like radar and video fusion, FTTM, and data communications, as well as a hyper-converged computing platform. Our partners deliver the application and the interface.

The solution enables digital and intelligent tunnel emergency management. It is able to correctly identify 95% of incidents and 90% of vehicles with dangerous loads.

With our partners, Huawei has developed more than 100 scenario-based solutions in a dozen different industries.

Three types of capabilities

To better support different scenarios, Huawei works with our partners to build three types of capabilities:

• digital transformation consulting and planning
• product and portfolio expertise
• solution development

These empower our customers in top-layer design, technology integration, and solution development.

Huawei offers support to our partners on enablement, platforms, funding, and talent.

Every year, we train more than 70,000 people, and develop and verify more than 1,000 solutions with our partners through our OpenLabs. Over the next three years, we will invest US$300 million to support our partners and train more talent through our ICT Academies and Huawei Authorized Learning Partners.

I would like to thank all of our customers and partners who have stood side by side with Huawei all these years. Thanks to your support, our revenue from the enterprise business reached US$8.17 billion in the first half of this year, a rise of 27.6% over 2021.

Huawei’s innovations are well recognized in many industries. Our data communications products have been named Gartner Customers’ Choice ten times in three years. Our optical transmission and access products have ranked first in market share for 13 straight years. Our storage products have been Leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for six years. And Huawei Cloud is among the world’s top five clouds.

Moving forward, we are confident that we will continue working with our partners to empower industry, create value for our customers, and unleash digital with innovative infrastructure.

____________________________________________________________

Learn more about Huawei Enterprise Business Group.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.