Huawei’s Partnership with Dongfeng Motors Drives Connected Cars

Dongfeng Motor Group was established in 1969 and is one of China’s dominant mainstay enterprises in the car industry. The company’s business is distributed in four base cities: Shiyang, Xiangyang, Wuhan, and Guangzhou. This forms the based in Hubei, influencing the whole country, facing the world business layout. Dongfeng ranked 68 on the 2017 Fortune Global 500.

Supporting All Services with Cloud

Affected by the recent macroeconomic downturn and other factors, China’s manufacturing sector is generally down. Dongfeng Motors faces a lot of pressure to increase business during slow growth and structural adjustments.

As a result, Dongfeng Group also set up their own corresponding 13th Five-Year Plan. In terms of informatization, the group proposes to use cloud computing technology to implement a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) to support all of the group’s range of services.

The group controls the entire service digitization strategy, from setting up the group’s entire digital warehouse to implementing Big Data analysis to gain insights from all data, and finally providing corresponding support services for each entity.

In terms of digitization for all of the strategic chain services, solid support is provided for the development of traditional services such as production, marketing, purchasing, and finance for all of Dongfeng Motors Group’s domains. Informatization support enables fast responses to up-to-the-minute changes in smart cars and network-connected cars for the next waves of technology.

Migrating Traditional Data Centers to the Cloud

To continually enhance service transformation, Dongfeng Motors Group constantly innovates their business models in order to promote the deep integration of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and connected cars. In order to meet the individual needs of the group’s more than 300 subsidiaries and migrate traditional data centers over to the cloud, Dongfeng joined hands with Huawei in 2015 and built the first internal private cloud pilot. To date, initial results are represented by four aspects:

The private cloud quickly responds to service requirements: First of all, the group requires their secure private cloud to perform high-performance operations, allowing services to run more smoothly, applications to be more flexible, and faster responses when changes occur in terms of user numbers and service requirements. The Huawei Cloud Data Center solution provides a service-centric Virtual Data Center (VDC) system that matches the existing structure. The logical isolation of different VDCs ensures highly efficient independence of tier-2 departments. Through the efforts of the IT operations team, there are already over 10 subsidiaries that utilize cloud computing services through VDC operations, further promoting a solid foundation for expanding cloud computing services.

Visual automatic and integrated management platform: Prior, data center operational management required investing large amounts of manpower, yet maintenance work is still not really in place. The Huawei cloud data center provides a visualized automatic and integrated management platform, greatly improving Operations and Maintenance (O&M) efficiency and quality. At the same time, the benefits of centralized infrastructure include increasing resource utilization and simpler O&M. Preliminary estimations indicate that the group’s overall IT costs decreased by 30 percent. As the work on later stages further develops, continuous improvement is expected.

End-to-End (E2E) security assurance: One of Dongfeng Group’s biggest concerns is cloud security. Huawei’s cloud data center provides comprehensive E2E security assurance in terms of user, network, data, and the cloud platform, ensuring secure protection of the entire architecture, enterprise data, and services.

Converged and open architecture: Finally, Huawei FusionSphere cloud operating system is developed based on OpenStack open architecture. The entire system delivers powerful virtualization functions and resource pool management, a diverse range of cloud-based service components and tools, and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) dedicated to cloud computing and optimization. FusionSphere widely supports heterogeneous hypervisor and hardware device access. This infrastructure complies with the converged and open architecture requirements that are so important to Dongfeng Group, achieving protection of the enterprise’s existing investment and ensuring compatibility for future development.

Enabling Opportunities Brought about by Emerging Industries

Dongfeng Motor Group recognizes that, by working with Huawei, solutions offer innovative, open technologies that enable the next generation of intelligence, Big Data, autonomous driving, and other strategic opportunities brought about by emerging industries, including the initiatives in the industrial revolution’s next wave of smart technologies. For Huawei, collaborating with Dongfeng helps to deepen Huawei’s position in the IoV and autonomous car connectivity fields while continuing to broaden the use of Huawei products and technology with automotive and transportation industries.

As a leading global ICT solutions provider, Huawei has a clear visions for key industries, with strong Research and Development (R&D) advantages, wide brand influence — especially with Fortune Global 500 enterprises — and comprehensive professional service capabilities. In the areas in the IoV, connected cars, and intelligent transportation, Huawei works with partners and customers to develop an ecosystem of powerful solutions across industries.

Customer Testimony

“Looking back at my work this past year, most of my time was spent with the Huawei team. In terms of products and solutions, Huawei responds to customer requirements very fast and is highly efficient in terms of product optimization. After the feedback is sent to R&D, measures are quickly taken to create an optimized version. With personnel’s cooperation, Huawei staff handles differences in opinion very well, resulting in high work efficiency. At the same time, in the cooperation process, Dongfeng also acquired valuable management experience from many of Huawei’s outstanding projects. We now use this knowledge in our own internal project processes. That’s why we believe the benefits we reaped from cooperating with Huawei are huge.”

— Qi Wei, IT Planning Director, Organization Information Department, Dongfeng Motor Group