Huawei Unleashes the Power of Technology for a Sustainable, Digital Europe

Ernest Zhang

President, Huawei Enterprise Business Group in Europe

In Europe, Huawei dives deep into scenarios and works with partners to support the region’s digital and green transition strategy.

It was 2021 when the Europe Commission proposed the Digital Decade policy program, aimed at guiding Europe’s digital transformation through 2030 with the purpose of achieving a digitally-skilled population, secure and sustainable digital infrastructures, digital transformation of businesses, and digitalisation of public services. Governments across Europe have made it their key aim to increase digital integration into their citizens’ daily lives. Applying the latest innovations to various industries is a core part of Europe’s aim to reap multiple efficiency gains and enhance the productive potential of its economy.

Aligning with Europe’s Digital Decade policy, Huawei works closely with partners in Europe to support the region’s digital and green transition strategy, committed to supporting Europe’s economic recovery, the success of its industry, and enabling sustainable development.

Innovating Digital Infrastructure “In Europe, For Europe”

As a committed partner of digital Europe, Huawei uses its connectivity, computing, and cloud technologies to find the right technology for the right scenario, support customers in furthering their digital transformation, and unleash the power of digital.

In the education industry, immersive teaching scenarios such as webcasts, distance education, and virtual reality (VR) are becoming increasingly popular as new teaching methods emerge. Schools are upgrading and reconstructing their existing network architecture to build leading education platforms and provide comprehensive education services.

For instance, a middle school in Denmark deployed Wi-Fi 6 using Huawei’s CloudCampus solution. This facilitates deeper collaboration across the schools as both the faculty and students can easily connect to the network from anywhere on the campus and through various devices, from mobile phones to computers. During major events, they can also enjoy uninterrupted Wi-Fi services even if they are densely populated.

Another would be a Dutch university, which deployed Huawei’s high-density Wi-Fi 6 solution on the campus to achieve better coverage and higher performance, providing better network services for more than 20,000 students. The test result showed that Huawei’s solution had 50% higher performance than expected in high-concurrency scenarios.

Meanwhile, it has become a standard within the hospitality industry to build eco-friendly hotels and reduce environmental impact. For an 18-hectare resort in Italy that receives more than 2,000 tourists each day during the peak summer season, it deployed an innovative two-layer network architecture that supports multi-network convergence with Huawei’s All-Optical Campus Solution to improve service experience and achieve sustainability goals. Its investments paid off: the eco-friendly and energy-saving passive optical network (PON) helped the resort reduce annual carbon emissions by more than 6,500kg, equivalent to planting 300 trees in a year. At the same time, tourists can easily connect to the network within the resort from anywhere, eliminating network complains entirely.

Huawei is also making a difference in Europe’s healthcare. A large hospital in southern France that sees admissions growing by 30% each year, was in urgent need to upgrade its legacy IT systems. Since deploying Huawei OceanStor Dorado, the hospital’s storage latency has fallen by 30%, performance has increased by 40%, and O&M has been streamlined, saving up to 30% in costs. According to the hospital’s data centre architect, Huawei storage enables “hospital services to remain uninterrupted no matter what happens.” With fast, reliable systems in place, TUH’s staff can now focus on what they do best, delivering the kind of quality care its ever-growing number of patients depend on.

In traditional industries, Huawei uses advanced technology to help customers implement digital transformation. An agricultural company in Spain is committed to optimising its digital infrastructure and integrating its business process in an effort to improve consumer service quality. However, as its business continues to grow, the existing network is stretched in capacity and performance: its network architecture cannot support the fast provisioning of new applications. Huawei’s SDN solution automates network connectivity and shortens provisioning by virtualising and integrating compute resources, decoupling the logical network from the physical data centre, upgrading to 10G and 40G connections with Huawei CloudEngine switches, and leveraging centralised visibility and enhanced O&M tools. The company’s CTO added that “with SDN technology, we modernised the data centre network and started our digital transformation journey. This gives us the capability to align business applications and service needs with the network infrastructure in a fast, flexible and secure way”.

Closing the Digital Skills Gap

The European Commission’s 2022 Digital Economy and Society Index shows that more than 37% of the European workforce lacks basic digital skills, and only 54% of 16- to 74-year-olds in the EU have basic digital skills. Separate to digital and intelligent transformations, developing digital talent and improving digital literacy is an enormous challenge for all countries. The EU’s Digital Decade policy program aims to train 20 million ICT specialists and equip 80% of adults with basic digital skills by 2030.

To address the skills gap created by accelerated digital transformation across all industries, Huawei leverages its successful ICT practices to build talent alliances, standardise talent requirements, upskill professionals, and demonstrate the value of digital talent in Europe. Huawei is committed to nurturing and training more talented ICT specialists and becoming the “fertile soil” out of which digital talent in Europe grows.

By 2022, Huawei had already built more than 200 ICT academies in partnership with local universities, and these academies had more than 10,000 students. This has been a crucial stepping stone in the careers of many specialists in Europe’s ICT industry and it has supported the development of a thriving digital economy.

Shaping a Greener Digital Environment

In addition to achieving digital transformation, the European Commission plans to make the region more energy independent by 2030. The two transformation processes are deeply interlinked.

Huawei believes that ICT will be crucial in the green development of industries across Europe. With more than 20 years of service experience in Europe, Huawei is enabling investment in data communications, green storage, and optical networks, in the context of the two transformation processes:

In data communications: Huawei uses its Wireless Intelligent Network Architecture (WINA) to create more sustainable campus IT infrastructures, yielding a 30% reduction in annual electricity consumption with a more streamlined infrastructure.

In green storage: Huawei leverages high-density designs, system convergence and data deduplication and compression technologies to build a new generation of green data centres.

In optical networks: Huawei enables the rollout of fibre to help enterprises reduce power consumption, save energy and reduce carbon emissions, aiming to achieve low-carbon and sustainable development for Europe.

To fulfill the objectives of the Digital Decade and stay competitive in the global technology race, Europe can further leverage the partnership with tech company such as Huawei, who is making a difference in infrastructure, talent, and green development under the commitment to be “in Europe, for Europe”.

Huawei continues to explore new opportunities for digital transformation and finds the best technical solutions for industries. At the same time, it also strives to work with global partners to launch the latest innovations and provide digital transformation solutions.

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 website at e.huawei.com or contact us.