At the recently concluded Huawei Cloud Summit Middle East and Africa 2022 in Dubai, UAE, Huawei reiterated the cloud's integral role in accelerating the region's digital transformation and inspiring innovation across its industries. Under the theme, “Inspire innovation with everything as a service”, the summit brought together over 1000 government leaders, customer representatives, and industry experts from the Middle East and Africa, exploring how cloud computing can serve and advance industries such as public services, finance, carriers, media, e-commerce, and gaming. During the summit, experts also shared how industries can better leverage cloud and AI technologies across various functions.
On the sidelines of the summit, Huawei Cloud Middle East held a media roundtable with its president Frank Dai. Dai shared Huawei Cloud’s vision of building the cloud foundation for an intelligent world with ubiquitous cloud and pervasive intelligence and detailed how it is providing ‘everything as a service’.
"Cloud is the future of ICT and the foundation of digital transformation in the Middle East. Cloud transformation has become a top priority for industries. To build the cloud infrastructure, there are four essential elements: technology, economic impact, talent ecosystem, and digital sovereignty. To this end, Huawei Cloud is working with partners to deepen digitalization and provide everything as a service,” said Dai.
Responding to Telecom Review’s first question on the fundamental strategies that business and organizations can adopt to integrate Cloud and AI with new as well as existing infrastructure to gain competitive edge, Dai said, “Everything as a service model that incorporates infrastructure as a service, technology as a service and expertise as a service can accelerate digital transformation, while also minimising the carbon footprint from their IT infrastructure, speed up the development of new apps and business processes, and enable organizations to innovate faster. We believe business leaders should adopt cloud native 2.0 architectures to boost innovation and digitalization. As one of the earliest adopters of container technology, Huawei has accumulated rich practical experience and provides fully vetted, full-stack container services for enterprise users to migrate applications to the cloud and succeed in the cloud native 2.0 era.
On Telecom Review’s second question around the outlook on cloud and AI market in the next 3 to 5 years in the region and industries likely to benefit from this market, Dai said, “Cloud plays an integral role in the region's digital transformation. Huawei Cloud can accelerate digital transformation in the region, achieve sustainable development targets, speed up the development of new apps and business processes, and enable organizations to innovate faster.
“In the Middle East specifically, we now have 66 SaaS partners working with us in the cloud realm, focusing on seven general enterprise solutions. To date, we also work on industry-specific scenarios in finance, education, healthcare, public sector and various other industry. We continue to diversify this ecosystem and welcome more partners to hold hands with us.
“This expansion of the ecosystem is being met by an expansion of our regions/availability zones (AZs) within the Middle East. This will enable us to offer customers more choice in the market, and address their data locality requirements working with a single end-to-end partner. We have done this rapidly and successfully in geographies such as Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Africa.”
Dai also spoke about Huawei’s focus on data security and privacy protection. The Company has invested heavily in cybersecurity, around $132.5 billion in terms of R&D with 5% of that investment going directly to cybersecurity. Huawei uses full-stack security products and ecosystem products to help customers build a security assurance system to ensure the security and reliability of customers' services on the cloud.
In 2021, Huawei Cloud Middle East announced an investment of $15 million to accelerate the development of local enterprises and ecosystems. This money will cultivate more than 1000 consulting partners, 500 technical partners, 3000 certified experts, and several hundred SMEs.
