How Was Huawei Named Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice Eight Times in Three Consecutive Years?

Jiang Junmu

C114 News Feature

Today, numerous online platforms list top restaurants based on the reviews left directly by diners. Unlike the world-famous Michelin star rating system, which relies on experts casting their judgment, there is no room for industry bias on such user-rated platforms. As such, then, these recommendations and scoring systems have become the most credible and applicable to people's daily restaurant choices.

Moving sideways into the high-tech world — where technical know-how is everything — there is also a world-renowned distinction where vendors are reviewed directly by their end-customers. It's known as Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice.

Gartner Peer Insights is an online platform that collects ratings and reviews of Information Technology (IT) software and services, written and read by IT professionals and technology decision-makers themselves — true peer insights. The goal is to help IT leaders make more insightful purchasing decisions and help technology providers improve their products by receiving objective, unbiased feedback from their customers. To date, Gartner Peer Insights includes more than 350,000 verified reviews in more than 355 markets.

Huawei is proud to have been singled out time and again among leading vendors who also receive Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice distinctions. Huawei has been especially successful in the network field, having been named Customers' Choice eight times in three consecutive years. Of particular significance, Huawei's firewalls have won this distinction for the first time in 2021, completing the set and ensuring that all four of Huawei's network domains have been recognized as a Customers' Choice.

Such an achievement, of course, was no easy feat given the external pressure Huawei has been under in recent times. It reaffirms Huawei's leading position and importance in terms of technologies and products. But how exactly has Huawei achieved this?

Success in All Network Domains

Recognition as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice is based on real reviews by end-user professionals, the people who actually purchase, implement, and use the products or services of vendors. Noted for its consistently rigorous criteria, Customers' Choice has quickly become one of the most credible distinctions and reports in the industry.

To receive a Customers' Choice, vendors must meet two key criteria. Specifically, vendors must have received at least 50 eligible customer reviews within the submission period, at least 20% of which are from vendors' non-primary industries. Furthermore, the average overall customer rating for vendors must be at least 4.5 out of 5 stars, with product performance, deployment, Operations and Maintenance (O&M), and service support all reviewed.

In April 2019, Huawei was named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice (in the network field) for the very first time. Since then, the company has garnered this title eight times over three consecutive years. And unlike other vendors specializing in only one field, Huawei is an all-round vendor and, in total, has been named a Customers' Choice in four categories — 'Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure,', 'WAN Edge Infrastructure,' 'Data Center and Cloud Networking,' and 'Network Firewalls.'

To elaborate, Huawei was recognized as a Customers' Choice for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure twice, in both January 2020 and May 2021. Similarly, Huawei won Customers' Choice for WAN Edge Infrastructure twice in both April 2020 and February 2021. Huawei was named Customers' Choice for Data Center and Cloud Networking three times, with wins in April 2019, October 2019, and November 2020. And for the first time, Huawei firewalls were honored as a Customers' Choice for Network Firewalls in April 2021.

What's most remarkable is that Huawei is the only vendor from outside North America to be included as a Customers' Choice in the Local Area Network (LAN), Wide Area Network (WAN), and data center market segments. And for the security market segment, Huawei is one of only two vendors from outside North America to receive this accolade. Time and gain, Huawei has won the highest customer rating among all selected vendors, signifying its long-lasting, consistent reputation.

For example, in the recently released Customers' Choice for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure (assessing an 18 month period up to March 31, 2021), Huawei received 191 customer reviews from around the world, with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars. This was the most customer reviews and highest customer rating out of all vendors.

An IT Engineer in the manufacturing industry in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region commented: "Huawei iMaster NCE is deployed in our cloud data center and provides automatic management of the entire network. O&M personnel do not need to perform command-line configuration, which facilitates management. In addition, IoT terminals can be intelligently identified to quickly authenticate devices and users, ensuring network security."

Customer Recognition and Trust as Driving Forces

Customer recognition and trust stem from Huawei's continued commitment to innovation, relentless pursuit of ever better capabilities, and sustained leadership.

"We are unswerving in our pursuit of innovation and breakthroughs in every generation of products. If we don't innovate, we'd rather not make new products," said Kevin Hu, President of Huawei's Data Communication Product Line, when talking about why innovation is the soul of Huawei in an interview with C114, an online media focused on ICT industry.

According to Huawei's 2020 annual report, Huawei's Research and Development (R&D) expenditure in 2020 reached CNY141.893 billion, equivalent to 15.9% of the company's annual revenue. In the past decade, Huawei has invested more than CNY720 billion into R&D. The company has approximately 105,000 employees engaged in R&D, accounting for 53.4% of the total workforce. In the data communication field, Huawei brings together the world's top R&D resources in terms of algorithms, architectures, and materials to build an extensive range of innovative technologies and products.

Innovation cannot be made without a clear path ahead. At Huawei, this path is to go wherever customers need us to be. To this end, Huawei has built more than 30 OpenLab-Proof of Concept (PoC) labs around the world and also set up DemoCloud, an online omni-channel service experience platform for partners. Together, these resources help to build a highly interactive and comprehensive system for validating and experiencing the company's advanced joint innovations and solutions in the data communication field. In this way, solutions can be developed to fully meet all customer requirements. For example, Huawei has incorporated the "stable and agile" bimodal infrastructure requirements of financial customers as the basis for developing target network solutions.

These efforts are paying off. For example, by the end of 2019, Huawei had obtained more than 8600 patents in the data communication field. At the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Huawei serves in more working group chairs and high-end positions than any other vendor. Huawei has also been actively engaged in developing 60% of the standards for Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) — the next-generation mainstream network protocol — as well as driving its commercial deployments worldwide.

Back in 1995, Huawei set up a research center in Beijing, with the vision of "developing China's own data communication products." At that time, a team of fewer than 10 people started working on the R&D of router products.

After years of effort, in 2012, Huawei unveiled our 480G routing line cards, half a year ahead of other vendors in the industry. This ground-breaking milestone marked our technological excellence and led the Internet Protocol (IP) backbone network into the 400G era.

In 2019, Huawei took the lead in launching intelligent IP network architecture and next generation data communication products. This signaled the leap from traditional IP networks toward intelligent IP networks.

Over the past three decades, generations of Huawei engineers have made unremitting efforts to innovate and move forward. It is thanks to such dedication that Huawei has developed the competence and confidence to lead the industry.

In recent years, all industries have accelerated their digital transformation. To keep up, Huawei has ceaselessly built up its end-to-end cloud-network capabilities by following the "digital, intelligent, and service-oriented" philosophy.

At the sixth Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF) held in October 2020, Huawei launched an intelligent cloud-network solution for cloud-network synergy scenarios. This new launch highlighted four unique capabilities: Network as a Service (NaaS), flexible multi-cloud connections, a deterministic experience, and cloud-network-security integration.

In February this year, Huawei went a step further at Mobile World Congress (MWC) Shanghai 2021 by announcing five new capabilities — one hop to cloud, one-network wide connection, one-click fast scheduling, one fiber for multiple purposes, and one-stop integrated security.

At this year's Huawei Global Analyst Summit held in April, Huawei further articulated its enhanced, intelligent cloud-network solution innovations, which covered four key scenarios: cloud campus network, cloud WAN, hyper-converged data center network, and network security. These solution enhancements enable enterprises to migrate to, and use clouds better.

But Huawei's capabilities in standards and products are only the tip of the iceberg. To develop such capabilities, much work goes on behind the scenes. For example, to fulfill the promise of "zero accidents," Huawei has built the industry's largest automated test factory, with more than 35,000 devices and 200,000 test scripts. This factory can offer 1:1 simulation of a running, live network. In addition, Huawei has developed the industry's first intelligent hardware test system that can cover all solder joints of boards without manual intervention. In addition to these highlights, Huawei has formulated strict quality inspection standards across the entire lifecycle, from design, development, and production, all the way to installation and operations.

The intelligent world represented by 5G, cloud, and AI is fast approaching, and digital transformation continues to evolve in breadth and depth. Against this backdrop, building a robust network as a foundation has become imperative.

Huawei's continued, customer-centric innovation allied to the endless pursuit of stronger capabilities has led to sustained leadership in the industry. This is perhaps the reason why all of Huawei's network domains have been named as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice, collectively eight times in three consecutive years.

Huawei believes that no matter how the external environment changes, customer recognition is all that truly matters.

In line with the spirit of innovation, Huawei's data communication solutions have a solid track record in more than 140 countries and regions, covering various industries, including the government, education, transportation, finance, and energy sectors.

Looking ahead, Huawei will continue to enhance its highly competitive intelligent cloud-network offerings and collaborate with more customers and partners for innovative design and in-depth service integration. Doing so will help enterprises stay ahead from the very start of their digital transformation journey. Huawei will also never cease to move forward in the future, bringing more excellent products and services to industries, and injecting endless momentum into the transformation of human society from quantitative to "intelligent."

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, products, and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. If you need to learn more about the products and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., please visit our product pages or contact us.