By Sun Hui, Director of B2B Cloud, Carrier BG, Huawei

In the past year, Huawei surveyed several hundred Chinese companies and nearly a thousand global companies directly or through consulting agencies. Survey results show that the digital transformation of industries can be divided into three stages. The first stage is connectivity, including the connectivity of equipment, processes, and data. Connectivity helps the physical world to go digital. The second stage is the monitoring and optimization of systems, and the final stage is intelligence. As applications and networks evolve toward SaaS and SDN, companies keep demanding connectivity and also increasingly willing to consume services rather than possessing own assets. As a result, various cloud-based ICT services have become a principal way to meet companies' needs. Large companies focus on international network access acceleration and the deployment of hybrid cloud, aiming to satisfy business expansion. Medium-sized technology companies are interested in the dynamic bandwidth adjustment and elastic computing resources extension. Small companies need one-stop ICT services to help them reduce costs. All these requirements present new market opportunities for ICT service providers. Things will be connected together in the future, it triggers the exponential growth of connectivity to generate enormous data assets and to activate the demand for cloud services.

According to a UN report released in 2010, the ICT industry has long been in the form of “supply” rather than demand-driven. Vendors previously provided services based on available technologies. However, times have changed. The ICT industry has seen its business model shift from being supply-driven to demand-driven. As a consequence, cloud services in the future will not be limited to data centers, but will rely more on connectivity. They will also be increasingly provided in an end-to-end manner. From Huawei's perspective, the "A + Cloud + X" model will help the company better respond to carriers' B2B service development. The "A" refers to carriers' advantages, such as localized professional services, security, bandwidth, quality of service (QoS), and enterprise private lines (EPLs). Based on these advantages, we can achieve cloud-and-network synergy, making cloud to be the unified entrance to develop new carrier B2B services (X). By adopting this model, we can involve more partners, focus on major industry scenarios, and help governments and enterprises go digital. This will in turn enable us to lead the competition in the B2B market and achieve effective growth. An example of this is the One Fiber, Seven Services solution Huawei provided for Guangdong Telecom. Apart from enterprise B2B cloud services, this best practice solution also enables seven kinds of service provision, including Cloud PBX, Cloud UC, Cloud IPCC, and EPL. Deutsche Telekom bases on its network and cloud to offer one-stop services, such as video surveillance cloud, bandwidth as a service (BWaaS), cloud meeting, and IoT cloud. All these services have been proven to be success.

Huawei is willing to work with carriers to identify targeted industries by leveraging carrier advantages and makes cloud as a unified platform and entrance of carrier B2B services to innovate new industry services. We are also with partners together to drive digital and intelligent society, to become the preferred enterprise digital enabler for digital strategies and cloudification and to leverage openness, cooperation and winning together to be an aggressive contributor in cloud ecosystem.