Huawei eyes on Singapore, India for enterprise growth

By Ellyne Phneah | September 2, 2013 |ZDNET

Summary: Within a handful of APAC countries, the networking giant is banking on the relative maturity of Singapore's IT infrastructure and a strong pool of customers and partners, and India where ICT investment is large.

Huawei will focus on Singapore and India, among other Asia-Pacific countries, to achieve its goal of growing its enterprise business by 40 percent this year.

According to William Xu, CEO of Huawei's enterprise business group, other than China where 50 percent of its business comes from, these two countries have strong ICT investment which make them growth targets for the Chinese telecoms equipment manufacturer.

Speaking to ZDNet Asia in an interview on Monday, Xu pointed out Singapore was important due to its mature ICT market, along with Huawei's large pool of enterprise customers and partners.

The Chinese company also hopes to replicate the various partnerships in Singapore in other parts of the Asia-Pacific region, Xu explained.

He also singled India as another key market within the region due to the the country's large investment in ICT investment. Huawei also has a large team in India for research and development, he added.

The other Asia-Pacific markets Huawei plans to focus on for its enterprise business expansion include Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Hong Kong, Xu pointed out.

Xu was responding to Huawei's announcement last month that it aimed to achieve 40 percent growth this year for its enterprise business, from US$1.9 billion to US$2.7 billion this year. The enterprise group is also the fastest growing part of its business compared to its carrier and consumer business, growing 25 percent in 2012 compared to 2011.

Enterprise product launches compete on technical specifications

At the Huawei Cloud Congress (HCC) held in Shanghai on Monday, the company launched enterprise products aimed at streamlining the deployment of new services and operations for customers, what it calls the "fusion strategy", Xu noted.

"To hit our goal, we want to focus on customer needs by continuously investing in research and development (R&D), and working with our partners to create products that add value to enterprises," he said, noting the company invested US$4.8 billion in global R&D last year.

These products are also the first of its kind on the market in terms of technical specifications, which helps Huawei's enterprise business stand out from its storage competitors, Xu said.

For example, one of the products, FusionCube Fusion Machine 2.0, a product integrating a set of applications reduces deployment time with a switching capacity of 15.6 terabit per second (Tbps), eliminating I/O (input/ouput) performance bottleneck, and a processing capacity of more than 10 times the traditional mini computer, Xu pointed out.

The OceanStore 18800F, is also the first full flash high-end storage, Xu said, noting it has five times the performance with the industry's 1 million IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and 10 times the speed of response of the microsecond latency.

The networking giant also launched the first "converged data plane" concept, the XVE platform, which eliminate data silos, giving customers the flexibility to build extensions, on-demand supply, global collaboration capabilities of storage resource pool, he added..