2012 Huawei Global Analyst Summit: Carrier Networks’ Business Is Shifting From Hardware To Software
Huawei hosted about 160 industry and financial analysts at its ninth annual analyst summit in Shenzhen, China in April 2012. The event showed us that Huawei’s carrier network activities are becoming increasingly software-focused. Huawei is building up its network software and professional services capabilities. This drive is reflected in its SoftCom solution, driven by the cloud computing delivery model in the network space. Huawei is well aware of the role software will play for future distributed and virtualized network infrastructure and network-centric solutions, where the data center is effectively becoming the phone switch for ICT solutions. In fact, Huawei goes as far as to say that hardware will be fairly commoditized and that differentiation will be based on software. Huawei is a member of more than 130 industry standard-defining bodies; as such, it influences the development of industry standards. Huawei maintains its own silicon chip fabrication capabilities (HiSilicon), which help deliver opex reductions and greater energy efficiency as part of its networking solutions for wired and wireless (WiFi, WiMAX, and LTE) environments. Huawei has been designing and assembling servers for a decade and offers blade and rack configurations designed to support cloud and virtualization environments. Huawei’s security solutions, greatly enhanced by Huawei buying the remaining 49% stake in its Huawei Symantec joint venture recently, include firewall, VPNs, intrusion detection, application gateways, and unified threat management. Huawei also works with other leading ICT vendors to deliver solutions according to customer requirements. Huawei’s GalaX Cloud operating system delivers large scale virtualization capability for compute and storage resources in a cloud deployment. Huawei assists carriers and enterprise customers with design implementation and operation of deployments through its SmartCare Services solution, which monitors and ensures the quality of the customer experience. Huawei is also developing a community of partners (200 carriers, 2,200 VARs and SIs, 1,000 solution partners, and 224 service partners, including 5,000 certified engineers globally) to create architectures and solution designs to accelerate adoption of Huawei’s products and services.