+ IT, New Growth: HUAWEI CLOUD Enabling Carriers for Business Success

-- In the era of cloud transformation, based on 30 years of experience in the telecom industry and rich practices in cloud transformation projects, Huawei designed carrier scenario-based HUAWEI CLOUD solutions to help carriers achieve connection monetization, service innovation, and operation efficiency improvement.

With the development of technologies such as 5G, Cloud Computing, Big Data and Edge Computing, cloud transformation has become a common choice for global telecom operators. According to Gartner's report, global carriers will increase their IT infrastructure investment in cloud transformation at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27% in the next five years.

Based on 30 years of experience in the telecom industry and rich practices in cloud transformation projects, Huawei has identified the critical factors for carriers' successful cloud transformation. Carriers need to plan cloud transformation strategies, paths, and partner selection according to their own telecom characteristics. Specifically, three aspects are described as follows:

1. Cloud transformation strategies should be formulated based on carriers' own strength

First of all, the biggest advantage of carriers lies in connectivity. Therefore, the cloud transformation should adopt the "Connectivity + Cloud" strategy based on the principle of maximizing the value of connectivity assets, so as to build unique competitiveness in the market. Second, carriers have the advantages of digital applications, massive number of users, and omni-channel. The goal of carriers' cloud transformation is to promote agile development and rapid rollout of innovative applications and develop users in the digital market. Finally, carriers need to improve operation efficiency and provide an efficient and reliable cloud-based operation support system for the continuous expansion of business services.

2. The path of cloud transformation should be selected based on the principle of "data security, system stability, and service agility"

Carrier networks run multiple IT systems, such as BSS, OSS, MSS, and Internet applications. Cloud transformation does not simply migrate these systems to the cloud. Instead, we need to determine whether to migrate these systems to the cloud, when to migrate them to the cloud, and what type of cloud to migrate to. To answer whether to migrate a system to the cloud, evaluate whether to migrate the system to the cloud from the technical perspective and business value, and consider factors such as complexity, migration difficulty, system architecture, and business benefits. As considering the right time to migrate to the cloud, carriers should adhere to the principles of non-mission critical applications before mission critical ones, simple applications before complex ones. As for the cloud to be migrated to, we should consider application data security, service agility and experience requirements, and TCO. Based on those factors, we can choose hybrid cloud, public cloud, and/or edge cloud to move forward.

3. Find trusted, capable, and experienced partners to cooperate with as the best partner selection strategy

The partners should have the same strategic goals as the carrier, no competition relationship. For instance, partner should have rich knowledge of the telecom industry, both CT and IT solutions, and delivery service capabilities. Furthermore, the partners need to have rich successful practical experience in the industry. Based on the characteristics of the telecom industry, carriers require partners to provide not only remote services, but also on-site service support when necessary. Therefore, partners must have sufficient local service capabilities to help carriers solve various difficulties encountered during transformation, such as organization management, process, employee training, and on-site services that are ready to respond to urgent problems, etc.

Huawei continues to provide high-quality services to global carriers, and provides leading ICT solutions and local support services around the world. Huawei is an ideal partner for carriers' cloud transformation.

Carrier scenario-based HUAWEI CLOUD solutions are designed to meet the actual requirements and characteristics of the telecom industry. It focuses on helping carriers achieve three goals, connection monetization, service innovation, and operation efficiency improvement.

1. "Connection + Cloud" expands the scope of connection monetization

Fully understanding of connectivity and the cloud-network synergy solution, HUAWEI CLOUD helps carriers expand the service and market boundaries related to connectivity and maximize the market value. For ToB industry customers in China, HUAWEI CLOUD uses the "Cloud + Network + Security" integrated deployment solution to expand the scope of traditional private line solutions and provide comprehensive ICT solutions for enterprise customers, as a result, achieved revenue growth by several times. To meet industry security compliance requirements, Huawei provides a resource isolation solution of a private network and a dedicated resource pool. In addition, Huawei uses E2E private network slicing technologies to achieve 99.999% network reliability and ultra-low network latency. As conclusion, Huawei provides cloud and intra-cloud security assurance services, on and off-cloud collaboration with end-to-end security assurance services.

2. "Service + Cloud" accelerates service innovation

With experience in the telecom industry and advanced cloud platform capabilities, HUAWEI CLOUD enables carriers to develop innovative services agilely and quickly to the market. In order for carriers to double their innovation speed in the digital era, it requires to combine the industry experience, service capabilities, and cloud technologies all together. Huawei has accumulated more than 30 years of experience in the telecom industry and service innovation practices in the connectivity field. With cloud services, carriers can achieve faster time to market (TTM) and market efficiency in service innovation, and increase revenue from new services. In Africa, the mobile wallet platform is deployed on HUAWEI CLOUD. The service rollout time is shortened from several months to several weeks. In addition, the HUAWEI CLOUD ecosystem can be shared, and the ecosystem rollout time is shortened from several months to one week. Telecom carriers have their own core telecom industry applications, such as Billing, OCS, and CEM. These core applications have unique requirements on cloud infrastructure. For example, most of the billing systems use the memory cache technology and require large-memory VMs on the cloud infrastructure. Another example is that after the cloud-native billing system's "multi-active" solution deploying on the cloud, the cloud platform must have cross-domain high-speed container channels. Huawei has been developing these core telecom applications for more than 20 years. Compared with other public cloud vendors, Huawei has a deeper understanding of these core telecom applications and uses customized, pre-integrated HUAWEI CLOUD telecom industry solutions to better meet these requirements, enabling core telecom applications to be migrated to the cloud to generate more business values.

3. "Operation + Cloud" improves operation efficiency

HUAWEI CLOUD uses the pre-optimized cloud solution to improve the operation efficiency of basic telecom services, increase the number of users, increase the ARPU, and drive the continuous growth of main services. Huawei's logical data lake solution uses the Hetu engine to implement collaborative data analysis without data migration, greatly improving cross-domain performance and reducing the analysis time from minutes to seconds. The HUAWEI CLOUD Stack (HCS) + HUAWEI CLOUD distributed solution is used to store key data locally, ensuring data security and compliance, meeting low latency requirements. Let’s take a carrier in Asia as an example. The number of 5G network users for this carrier accounts for only 10% of all 5G users initially. Huawei uses the logical data lake solution to implement real-time collaborative analysis of data in the BSS and OSS domains, improving service operation efficiency and increasing the 5G user marketing campaign success rate by 180%.

Based on years of telecom industry understanding, cloud migration practices, and cloud technology capabilities, Huawei is able to provide cloud transformation consulting and planning services more closely related to the telecom industry requirements. Over the past decades, carriers have continuously invested in and locally deployed IT infrastructures. During cloud transformation, Huawei will consider reusing carriers' existing investments and give full play to carriers' advantages, such as telecom networks, applications, and data. In addition, Huawei will investigate and analyze carriers' current situation. Based on the overall assessment of strategic planning and service status quo, Huawei will provide customized cloud blueprints and migration planning for carriers, and help carriers smoothly implement cloud transformation to minimize risks.

Currently, HUAWEI CLOUD has world-leading global cloud infrastructure, telecom industry solutions, delivery services, and operation capabilities. It provides distributed cloud architecture and solutions for cloud stack, public cloud, and edge cloud, and supports local deployment. Huawei ensures data security compliance and provides more comprehensive local deployment of high-level cloud services, such as databases, big data, and containers. The local cloud user experience is the same as that of the public, meeting the cloud transformation requirements of telecom services.

The vehicle of cloud transformation is moving forward. Only when carriers take full advantage of telecom industry knowhow, combine cloud technologies that enable the telecom industry, and select the best partners who could understand the telecom industry business, they can seize the opportunities in cloud transformation journey. Over the past 30 years, Huawei has worked with global carriers. By the end of 2022, Huawei has carried out in-depth cloud transformation cooperation with more than 140 carriers around the globe, in which both carriers and Huawei are jointly pioneering the successful cloud transformation journey and creating new business growth in the cloud era.