Key Success Factors for Huawei Being Named Leader by Gartner

Yuan Yaru

Marketing Director of the Campus Domain of Huawei Datacom Product Line

Huawei is named a leader by Gartner in its 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure released on December 22, 2022.

Entering the Gartner Magic Quadrant is a coveted honor for most companies. Only some companies can be shortlisted into the Gartner Magic Quadrant. And just few companies, who are widely recognized as top industry players, are able to enter the Leaders quadrant.

According to Gartner's report, Huawei has a comprehensive wired and wireless product portfolio, thereby efficiently addressing all customer use cases. The iMaster NCE-Campus network management platform provides Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) assurance services, user policy orchestration, and intelligent network verification. Huawei is also focused on supporting firms that are adopting a "wireless-first" strategy. A focus on integrated features that support ease of management and high levels of end-user experience has contributed to growth in Wi-Fi revenue of over 50% in 2021.

In 2011, Huawei entered the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure for the first time. Since then, Huawei has moved upwards, step by step, from the Niche Players Quadrant to the Leaders Quadrant. And Huawei is the only vendor that has entered every of the four quadrants. This impressive result is impossible without Huawei's relentless efforts over the past ten years, especially continued investments in campus network innovations that best meet customer requirements.

Huawei has a holistic set of CloudCampus offerings — covering LANs, WLANs, and WANs — tailored to the enterprise wired and wireless infrastructure field. In particular, Huawei iMaster NCE, the industry's first integrated management, control, and analysis system, draws on AI and Machine Learning (ML) to implement network-wide deployment automation, policy automation, and intelligent Operations and Maintenance (O&M). Additionally, Huawei CloudCampus is the industry's first to achieve the L3 autonomous driving network for campuses.

Huawei makes continued innovation to lead the market, including the following:

Hardware innovations

• The Power over Ethernet (PoE) distance of traditional Ethernet cables is limited to 100 m. Huawei changes the game by launching the industry's first optical-electrical PoE solution that enables PoE at up to 2000 m, 20 times longer than that using traditional Ethernet cables. This resolves the difficulties in power supply to terminals, and more importantly, greatly reduces the number of required Extra-Low Voltage (ELV) rooms, ultimately slashing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 30%.

• Huawei launched the industry's highest-density modular aggregation/access switch — CloudEngine S8700, whose port density is eight times that of the industry average. To greatly improve reliability of CloudEngine S8700 modular switches, Huawei introduced an innovative active-active main control board solution for redundancy backup. This solution uses dual fed and selective receiving mode to slash the switchover time of main control boards from 50 ms to less than 5 ms (just 1/10 of the industry average), greatly reducing the impact on user services. More importantly, the uplink bandwidth of the entire device is not halved, ensuring always-on services.

• Huawei has an extensive range of cutting-edge technologies in the antenna field. To date, Huawei has launched many generations of innovative smart antennas, standing out with many industry firsts. The first-generation smart antennas offer 10% greater coverage range and 2 dB higher signal strength than the industry average.

The second-generation smart antennas have the highest-level integration of antenna elements in the industry. By using industry-leading algorithms, such smart antennas ensure always-on signals for users and offer 20% greater coverage range than the industry average. This means better signal coverage without blind spots.

The third-generation smart antennas refer to our dynamic-zoom smart antennas, first of the kind in the industry. They support both omnidirectional and high-density coverage modes and can automatically adapt to different terminal density scenarios. This is a great fit to cope with tidal access of terminals in actual scenarios.

We also have innovative scenario-specific smart antennas. For example, the industry's first butterfly-pattern smart antennas adopt an innovative dual-beam design. As a result, a single AP is sufficient to cover three rooms, greatly saving customers' investment.

• Our innovative wireless Access Point (AP) with built-in dual-PCIe slots, which is first of its kind in the industry, can unlock more Wi-Fi and IoT convergence use cases, such as Electronic Shelf Label (ESL), protecting customer investment.

• Huawei also unveiled the industry's first Wi-Fi 7 AP. It is designed with first-of-its-kind hardware architecture that reduces the AP's structure layers from 5 to only 3. This AP is highly integrated, without antenna reflector boards. As such, cables are no longer needed inside the AP, significantly improving the reliability of hardware.

Software innovations

• To simplify the network management of large enterprises with multiple branches, Huawei launched the industry's first one-stop management platform — iMaster NCE-Campus — across WLANs, LANs, and WANs. Powered by AI and ML, iMaster NCE-Campus supports network device management, automatic control, and intelligent O&M. Its stand-out features, such as AI-based intent-driven deployment, big data-based wireless optimization, and intelligent verification, are all first of their kind in the industry.

• In 2021, Huawei unveiled the industry's first L3 autonomous driving network for campuses. Specifically, with iMaster NCE-Campus and iMaster NCE-CampusInsight, Huawei helps build a "zero intervention, zero wait, and zero interruption" campus network.

• Huawei also keeps innovating roaming algorithms. For example, our unique lossless roaming technology ensures zero packet loss for services during roaming, and therefore is ideal for Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) and other demanding scenarios. The end result is 70% higher roaming handover efficiency, greatly improving service experience during device mobility.

• Huawei also constantly innovates Wi-Fi performance algorithms. We take the lead in introducing some Wi-Fi 7 technologies, such as multi-AP Coordinated Spatial Reuse (CoSR), to Wi-Fi 6 products. Doing so solves co-channel interference in continuous wireless networking and improves network performance by 20%. Our intelligent multimedia scheduling technology ensures smooth audio and video services, which are free from rate limiting on the entire network. Our Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) and Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) joint scheduling technology improves network-wide performance by 35%.

• Huawei keeps developing innovative technologies to ensure Wi-Fi reliability. For example, our Wi-Fi dual fed and selective receiving technology — first of its kind in the industry — ensures ultra-high reliability of 99.999% and ultra-low latency of 10 ms. Our air interface slicing technology provides deterministic transmission channels for mission-critical services, without the need of resource contention. This offers deterministic experience and ensures ultra-high reliability for production networks.

Architecture innovations

To simplify network management, Huawei launched an innovative Wireless Intelligent Network Architecture (WINA) with the CloudEngine S8700 switch at the core. The new architecture simplifies the three-layer network into a two-layer one by leveraging innovative hybrid optical-electrical technology and Remote Unit (RU)-based port expansion. All of this greatly reduces cabling and slashes the number of managed network nodes by 80%.

Business model innovations

Enterprises want to manage their own cloud managed networks, and likewise, Managed Service Provider (MSPs) intend to operate their own cloud managed networks. To meet this, Huawei launched a flexible business model for its cloud management platform that is leasable and salable. Three modes are supported: on-premises, Huawei public cloud, and MSP-owned cloud deployment.

Huawei provides an extensive range of technical support services for devices and solutions. Specifically, Huawei offers a global support platform that features remote, centralized, standardized, and intelligent services, as well as advanced IT tools and powerful Issue To Resolution (ITR) processes. Huawei can also deploy dedicated global technical support teams that promptly respond to and efficiently handle customer service requests. Ultimately, all of this ensures the security, stability, and reliability of your networks when you need it most.

According to Gartner's statistics of global market shares, Huawei is one of the top 3 vendors in the enterprise wired and wireless LAN infrastructure field. More importantly, Huawei has weathered supply chain issues better than other vendors amid today's supply chain challenges.

Huawei remains dedicated to the campus network domain for 28 years since its first switch was marketed in 1994. To date, Huawei's Data Communication Product Line has set up 14 R&D centers around the world, and boasts more than 11,000 R&D engineers and over 11,500 patents. Huawei holds leading positions in 12 prestigious standards-defining organizations, and has been making the largest contributions to standards such as Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7, and SRv6.

Huawei never ceases to innovate, constantly builds up its core competitiveness, and stays true to its vision of becoming the preferred vendor of campus network solutions for diverse industries around the world.

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