‘Fertile Soil’ Grows a Robust Ecosystem

In the spring of 2018, the Huawei China Eco-Partner Conference 2018 was held in Qingdao. A feast for guests interested in Smart City construction. Huawei exhibited smart solutions for a full range of domains, including education, healthcare, government, industry, and business — and invited more than 700 industry professionals to participate in a summit meeting: ‘Aggregating Ecosystem Partners to Build Living Smart Cities.’ Domain experts, contractors, government spokespeople, and enterprise representatives all shared their views on current development trends, recent construction experiences, and the Huawei Smart City development ecosystem.

Smart City Ecosystem Highlights

According to Zhang Yande — President, China Smart City Department, Huawei Enterprise Business Group (EBG) — smart cities must meet the following three standards:

• Implement Smart City requirements as established by national ministries and commissions to ensure citizen quality of life.

• Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of city management by using cloud computing, Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and mobile Internet technologies.

• Accelerate local industries through digital transformation.

These three standards are also applicable to all phases of Smart City system development, from top-level design to infrastructure construction to operating services. Effective Smart City deployments require specialized ecosystem partners from each sector to base their solutions on Huawei’s platform specifications to meet customer requirements. The goal is to promote urban innovation, enable transformation, and improve quality of life.

TelChina Smart Industry Group Co., Ltd. (TelChina) is a core partner in Huawei’s Smart City ecosystem, and has cooperated with Huawei to deploy the Smart City platform in Weifang, Gao Qing, the high-technology district for Qingdao. Huawei and TelChina have jointly developed a comprehensive Smart City system and method covering technology, applications, and services.

Ma Shujie, Chairman of TelChina, said Huawei and their Smart City partners have a clear goal — improve everyone’s well-being through Smart City construction.

Ma is particularly impressed by two characteristics of the Huawei Smart City ecosystem. First is the value proposition. With Huawei’s assistance, cooperating enterprises are able to fully unleash the strength of their innovation. In the Huawei ecosystem, partners form differentiated products and services to provide cities with best-in-class Smart City services for sustainable development and operations efficiency. Second, both Huawei and their partners foresee a broad space where they can reliably grow together over the long term, which enables them to stay focused on key domains, and encourages a professional and dedicated atmosphere for cooperation.

In addition to instilling value and leadership, Huawei establishes clear boundaries between all stakeholders that contribute to the attraction of its Smart City ecosystem.

Huawei adheres to the core principle of not competing with its partners. Further, Huawei emphasizes partner cooperation in all phases of the Smart City life cycle to strengthen the advantages of Huawei’s Smart City platform. Huawei is committed to providing partners with opportunities for learning, communication, marketing, and market expansion.

‘Fertile Soil’ Nurtures Smart City Development

Huawei recently proposed the ‘fertile soil’ concept. By focusing on ICT infrastructure and smart terminals, Huawei provides an information-based, automated, and intelligent environment in which partners are encouraged to grow their businesses.

Jia Xibei, CEO of Shenzhen Audaque, has his own understanding of ‘fertile soil:’ Partners must be self-sufficient and prepared to push through inevitable challenges to grow in Huawei’s new environment. Jia explained that Smart Cities are not constructed overnight, and require a determined effort. Indeed, building a Smart City ecosystem demands a devotion to delivering quality services that bring real happiness to city residents through hard work and innovation.

Shenzhen Audaque began working in the Big Data domain in 2011, and the company has processed billions of records using in-house technology. In China, this type of data management service is still regarded as the cutting edge for advanced applications. However, to Jia’s team it is a direct extension of the established trends in large-scale urban data convergence, and the value is evident. Shenzhen Audaque focuses on reducing theories to practice through technologies to create data services that meet government regulations for financial industries. Shenzhen Audaque fully leverages the value of data to improve human welfare, revitalize local economies, improve governance, and optimize government operations.

To address problems with legacy Information Technology (IT) installations such as data silos, poor quality data, insufficient application demand, and more — Shenzhen Audaque and Huawei have jointly released the Audaque & Huawei City Big Data Solution.

The solution provides full-lifecycle management for new Smart City-oriented data collection, aggregation, sharing, mining, and services that establishes a scientifically based decision-making mechanism applying innovative data-driven presentations. The objective of this joint solution is to optimize the government’s management philosophy and social governance mode.

To ultimately benefit people and industries, an integrated data platform is indispensable. Audaque and Huawei include the underlying technical infrastructure, a middle-layer for data exchange, and upper-layer applications supporting the interconnection of all systems.

Zhang emphasizes additional prerequisites for Smart City construction. First, data must be converged and streamlined to allow city departments to collaborate with each other by forming a unified ‘neural data pipeline’ for improved command efficiency. Second, Smart Cities need to collect IoT terminal data from across each city, analyze and process the data, and deliver results through a ‘neural platform.’

Smart City construction relies on high-quality infrastructures, operations, and services; and must also deliver superior data management. A ‘Do it Yourself’ (DIY) spirit is reflected not only in the efforts of the builders, but more importantly, in the objectives of administrators following their own development path. The key is to identify the practices that promote each city’s exceptional characteristics.

Four Aspects Improve the City Ecosystem

At the Huawei China Eco-Partner Conference 2018, Huawei’s exhibition area, forum, and new cooperative relationships conveyed the unique value of the company’s approach to Smart City.

• Adhere to the ‘Platform + Ecosystem’ strategy, aggregate ecosystem partners through open platforms, and jointly provide customers with the tools required for Smart City construction.

• Provide key technical capabilities for Smart City construction and become an important standards contributor and technical innovation leader in cloud computing, Big Data, IoT, 5G, Artificial Intelligence, and other domains.

• Set clear business boundaries (e.g. circumventing user applications or data).

• Play a leading role as a Smart City practitioner.

In short, the Huawei Smart City Ecosystem serves as ‘fertile soil’ for cultivating the wellness of the larger ecosystem through data science, data management, and operations services — as is reflected in every aspect of Huawei’s new blueprint for Smart City design.