A Digital Symphony Composed of Technology & Ecosystem
Digital transformation is the theme of the digital world; the art of cooperation and innovation, and a tune in which all notes harmonize to create a splendid experience.
By Lu Qi, President, Marketing and Solution Sales Department, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 2018-05-26
Technology Orchestrates a Digital Symphony in the Home of Classical Music
Germany is a manufacturing leader and a digital transformation pioneer. Hannover will hold the annual Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) summit, CEBIT, in June 2018 at which new thoughts on the digital future will be presented. During the event, Huawei’s exhibition will consist of four sections: Digital economy (d!conomy), digital technology (d!tec), digital discussion (d!talk), and digital campus (d!campus).
As a shining pearl in the gallery of European music, Germany has given us many renowned composers like Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms. From June 11 to June 15, 2018, Huawei will collaborate with more than one hundred partners to host our global customers at CEBIT, the grand international ICT exhibition. Together, we will compose a digital transformation symphony. Our exhibition resonates with three themes: Business, Technology, and Ecosystem. As an ensemble, we will demonstrate our innovative ICT and solutions in cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), as well as share our best practices for digital transformation.
Digital Technology Drives National Development, Industry Transformation, and Upgrades
Countries throughout the world are actively using new ICT like cloud computing and Big Data to promote social development, industry transformation, and innovation. These technologies infuse new momentum into economic development.
The digital economy is playing an increasingly important role in national economic development. Statistics show that the digital economy is growing much faster than other industries in China, the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Take Japan as an example; Japan’s digital economy exceeds its traditional economy by 6 times in growth rate. Digital transformation has become a new force driving national development, industry transformation, and innovation.
In 2017, Huawei and Oxford Economics released Digital Spillover , a jointly published report on the impact of the digital economy. Our analysis suggests that over the past three decades, a USD 1 investment in digital technologies has led to a USD 20 rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on average. This Return On Investment (ROI) dwarfs the 3:1 return for non-technology investments in the same period. This result shows that for every USD 1 investment, the average return to GDP is 6.7 times higher for digital investments than for non-digital investments. The global digital economy is growing rapidly and evolving constantly, in fact, over the past 15 years it has grown 2.5 times faster than the global GDP. IDC forecasts that by 2020, global digital transformation will underlie a USD 18 trillion (CNY 114.8 trillion) market. For now, 46 percent of the world’s enterprises have listed increasing digital service business as their first priority over the next year. The same number is 69 percent in China.
We believe that in the next three decades, the traditional economy will experience extensive digitalization. Digital technology will reshape every industry. AI will affect every enterprise. Industry players must efficiently respond to market changes, and use new technologies and business models to explore the latest paths to innovation. To do so, enterprises need world-class digital partners to offer them reliable, easy-to-use digital platforms. Huawei is actively exploring this field and striving to become our customers’ best partner for digital transformation.
New Cities Pay More Attention to Intelligence
Statistics from the World Bank, World Economic Forum, and other organizations show that new smarter cities pay more attention to their intelligence levels.
Huawei leverages new ICT to build ‘nervous system’ functionalities for cities. With our comprehensive ecosystem in place, Huawei offers holistic Smart City solutions that cover everything from top-level architecture to service applications. In Yanbu, an emerging city in Saudi Arabia, Huawei works with industry partners to develop a series of smart applications on a unified platform. The Intelligent Operation Center and Big Data applications have improved the efficiency of Yanbu’s overall administration, increased local investment by 18 percent, and created 18,000 new jobs.
Smart City development focuses on visualized, intelligent awareness. In 2017, Huawei released the industry’s first video cloud solution that supports on-cloud operations and distributed network-wide intelligence. The solution perfectly meets customer requirements for collaborative security protection that not only changes the ways in which video is watched, but also how it is used. Taking Shenzhen, China as an example. Huawei’s video cloud solution, deployed in 2017, has helped the city solve more than 60 percent of its criminal cases and reduce its annual caseload by 25 percent.
Innovation and Digital Technology Development Upgrade Traditional Manufacturing
Many countries have planned their national strategies to promote the upgrade and development of their manufacturing industries, such as Germany’s Industry 4.0, Made in China 2025, and Made in India. These strategies are all based on innovation and development of digital technologies. Industrial statistics show that the rate of digitalization is growing explosively in a number of industries, such as manufacturing, oil and gas, transportation, and smart buildings. Innovative digital technologies are affecting traditional industry transformation like never before.
Huawei also provides basic communications abilities and advanced AI technologies to help traditional automakers leverage digitalization opportunities and gain the competitive edge created by digital transformation. In communications, Huawei has been serving the telecommunications industry for decades and has accrued rich experience. With regard to AI, Huawei provides proprietary AI chips that can effectively promote connected and intelligent car development. Furthermore, the European automobile giant, Groupe PSA, chose Huawei as its partner to build the Connected Vehicle Modular Platform (CVMP). To date, this connected car platform has covered 89 countries around the world. PSA plans to connect 8 million cars to the platform by 2025 and offer online car-scheduling, onboard entertainment, driving behavior analysis, emergency rescue, fleet management, car resales, and many other services. Additionally, Huawei helped Dongfeng Motor Group develop a private cloud to connect Dongfeng’s 15 subsidiaries to its cloud data center. This drastically accelerates Dongfeng’s business transformation and has reduced the group’s IT costs by 30 percent.
ICT Drives Financial Innovation: Digital Technology Rrovides Banks with New Competitive Advantages
During this period of digital transition, the banking and insurance industries are impacted by economic globalization in addition to new rules, technologies, and customer behaviors. In fact, McKinsey has forecast that banks must master digital technologies in three to five years if they are to survive incoming market competition.
Huawei offers top financial customers a series of innovative solutions that cover campus networks, video surveillance, data centers, financial cloud, and Big Data analytics. China Merchants Bank (CMB) is raising customer satisfaction to a whole new level by using Huawei’s Big Data Cloud Platform customized with a number of innovative, real-time services for targeted customer groups. Huawei and China Pacific Insurance (CPI) built the Basic Big Data Application Platform to help CPI crack down on fraud, settle claims, prevent risks, and conduct direct marketing.
Bits Drive Watts: ICT Brings a Brighter Future to the Electric Power Industry
The electric power industry has already started its digital transformation. In the next decade, ICT and smart grids will converge with each other more extensively to achieve faster development, creating more opportunities throughout the value chain, and bringing a better future to the industry.
Huawei offers solutions such as the Electric Power Cloud, Electric Power Communications Network, Electric Power IoT, and other technologies to help world-leading power companies develop diverse automatic and intelligent services. These solutions not only help power companies improve energy management efficiency, but also offer security protection to ensure stable power grid operations. Huawei’s Passive Optical LAN (POL) or Agile POL Solution helps Italian electricity company Enel complete their digital transformation and build a more reliable, efficient, and energy-saving communications network. Enel’s new network has lowered power consumption by more than 60 percent, reduced their equipment foot print by 80 percent, increased deployment efficiency by 50 percent, cut down Operational Expenditure (OPEX) by more than 50 percent, dramatically improved Enel’s cloud and mobile service experiences, and has boosted office efficiency.
Technology Sonata: Three Core Abilities Secure Huawei’s Leadership in the Future Digital World
In April 2018, Huawei released the Global Industry Vision 2025. In this report, Huawei forecasts that the world will have 40 billion personal smart devices and 1 trillion connections by 2025, creating a USD 23 trillion (CNY 146.7 trillion) market. By then everything will be perceptive, connected, and intelligent.
ICT will undoubtedly play a key role in this groundbreaking transformation. The ICT industry is shouldering the responsibility to construct the digital infrastructure for intelligent industrial applications. ICT companies must pioneer intelligent transformation internally before they are able to help transform enterprises in other areas. If the future digital world is a grand symphony, then digital transformation shall be its theme. The ICT industry must build a solid stage and provide harmonious support to orchestrate this concert.
The ICT industry is entering a new phase of development. During this transition, ICT and digital infrastructures will be widely implemented in all industries and sectors. Digital technology is extending from support systems to production and decision systems in almost all enterprises. To handle these various changes, ICT companies are shifting their attention and investment from vertical industries to horizontal platform industries. This is why Huawei announced a new vision at the end of 2017: Bringing digital to every person, home, and organization to create a fully connected intelligent world.
Over the last few years, Huawei has invested intensively in cloud computing, Big Data, the IoT, mobile broadband, AI, and other cutting-edge technologies that are driving digital transformation. Despite their uncertainties in future development and commercial implementation, these technologies have many common chords. They will all need chips, mathematical algorithms, and architectures.
Huawei has accumulated solid capabilities in these three aspects over several decades of ICT product development. These abilities enable Huawei to replicate its successful experience from one product to another, provide competitive products and solutions to enterprises, create a powerful foundation for innovation with our ecosystem partners, and support our customers’ digital transformation across all industries.
Huawei is leading optical communications, wireless, and data center development. For example, when selecting data center products, customers want high speed, stable operations, high energy efficiency, and small equipment footprints. Huawei gained experience in the areas of chips, algorithms, and design architecture from the optical communications and wireless domains. With these abilities in place, Huawei developed the world’s fastest and most stable all-flash storage product. The OceanStor platform exceeds the industry average for Input/output Operations per Second (IOPS) by more than 250 percent. Moreover, Huawei designed the industry’s first mission-critical server that supports online replacement of Central Processing Unit (CPU) and memory units. Huawei chips and architectures help customers reduce data center power consumption (by 38 percent) and space without compromising service performance and reliability. This effectively improves the energy efficiency of data centers, which further reduces the cooling and maintenance costs of these facilities.
In the area of cellular wireless communications, Huawei offers the world-leading Radio Access Network (SingleRAN) products that support multiple-bands, multi-models, and assure VIP experiences. When replicating these core technologies to the Wi-Fi domain, Huawei is capable of providing various features for the enterprise communications market, such as three-band/ultra-large capacity, multi-model convergence (Wi-Fi + e-Label + ZigBee), user-based signal beam adjustment, and intelligent antennas to ensure an optimal customer experience. These achievements contribute to Huawei taking the lead in the market for Wi-Fi technology.
AI first came into being in the 1980s, but was not commercially used on a large scale until recently. As ICT products experienced rapid growth in communications, computing, and storage abilities over the last few years, user experiences have been elevated to unprecedented levels. This places AI on a fast track to commercial use. For secure commercial utilization, AI needs lightning-fast computing and network infrastructures. Based on this, Huawei has customized a series of products and solutions for AI applications. These products are highly advanced and feature top-notch performance. For example, just seven Huawei Graphics Processing Units (GPU) servers equal 200 traditional servers in performance. Huawei’s all-flash storage keeps latency permanently below 0.5 millisecond, half of the industry average. Huawei’s ultra-speed AI Fabric network uses innovative algorithms that shorten AI training by 40 percent.
As we move into the future, Huawei will leverage its advantages in chips, mathematical algorithms, and architectures to ensure its leadership in the ICT industry. These three core abilities allow Huawei to continuously provide innovative products and solutions for communications, computing, and storage, and bring more benefits to customers.
Ecosystem Minuet: Huawei Creates CNY 1 billion Partner Incentive Fund
Digital transformation is the theme of our digital world — the art of cooperation and innovation, and a crescendo in which all chords harmonize to create a magnificent experience.
Huawei places great value on our ecosystem and partnership development. We need stronger and more holistic ecosystems to win in the digital future because we believe that future market competition is not between companies, but between ecosystems. Huawei provides industry-leading all-stack ‘cloud-pipe-device’ solutions to help customers design and implement top-level ICT architectures. Adhering to the ‘platform + ecosystem’ strategy, Huawei works with partners to develop open solutions and a win-win strategy. We strive to build a platform to accommodate all systems and a resilient infrastructure for ecosystems. Together, we create an ecosystem value chain that enterprise customers need for digital transformation. Currently, 197 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, including 45 of the top 100, have chosen Huawei as their digital transformation partner.
Looking towards the future, Huawei will open our ICT, marketing, training, and service platforms to our partners to help them achieve comprehensive cross-border development. Over the next 3 years, we will offer effective support to help 100 partners achieve USD 15.6 million (CNY 100 million) in income, develop more than 1,200 solution partners, and establish a USD 156.7 million (CNY 1 billion) incentive fund for cloud partners.
This is a great time. The prelude of digital transformation has begun. Huawei will play the innovative, powerful sonata of technology and resonate with our global partners’ minuet and industry customers’ variations. Together, we will orchestrate a majestic digital symphony, in concert with the new age of digital business.