Earlier this month, MachNation attended Huawei Connect 2017 in Shanghai, China. The event is Huawei’s annual gathering bringing together customers and partners from around the world.
In his keynote, Guo Ping, the Deputy Chairman of the Board and Rotating CEO, declared that “Huawei is determined and capable to build one of the world’s five clouds”. Huawei’s push into the cloud market is part of an effort to seek new services-based revenues outside of it’s core carrier and hardware businesses. Huawei’s new cloud business will compete with Alibaba and Wanda Internet Technology Group in the Chinese market.
From an IoT perspective, with this commitment, Huawei has indicated that it will expand it’s IoT stack and offer IaaS to its customers. Currently, Huawei offers edge devices, radios, connectivity management, data management and device management to support IoT solutions. With the addition of cloud, Huawei will be able to provide its IoT platform as a service and provide a more complete technology stack for carriers and enterprises alike.
At the conference, Huawei also demonstrated its focus on and an expansive set of capabilities around the IoT edge. Showcasing their partnership with Schindler, Huawei demonstrated how it has provided key edge and edge management capabilities to one of the largest elevator manufacturers in the world. The Schindler Ahead solution leverages Huawei’s technologies to offer remote monitoring, real-time analysis, and predictive maintenance services which seek to reduce downtime and provide an improved passenger experience.
MachNation research suggests that reducing complexity of putting together an IoT solution from 5-7 components is key to accelerating deployment and adoption of IoT solutions. In the future, we hope to see Huawei further integrate their hardware and edge offerings with their IoT platform OceanConnect to deliver seamless connectivity and device management for edge devices.