Huawei has, since the release of their flagship P8 and then the critically acclaimed Nexus 6P, found themselves on a wave of successes, coming one after the other. In this climate, they have suddenly found themselves going toe to toe with top Android OEMs like Samsung and LG. Because of that, they’ve been jockeying for both supremacy and, in some ways, identity. An announcement made at the Huawei Analyst Summit for 2016 makes this apparent. Huawei’s rotating CEO, Eric Xu, took to the stage to announce that Huawei was planning for an “all cloud” approach in the near future.
According to Xu, Huawei will be refining their approaches to many products and solutions to send them fully into the cloud, citing the revolution as being somewhat like the rise to ubiquity of IP standards. He said that Huawei will be pursuing the development of cloud-based solutions in areas like IoT, video and service platforms in order to “seize new business opportunities”. He also spoke of a new infrastructure with a cloud backend that focuses on sharing of hardware resources, known as Network Function Virtualization. He did note that the current approach will incur a cost in the form of network agility, but also that Huawei will be addressing this concern by converting mainline operations to cloud-based systems, allowing easy deployment and integration of new systems for Huawei and leased resources used by third parties. He calls this backend conversion Network Function Cloudification”.
Huawei’s plan is to move toward the cloud in equipment, network, operations and services, essentially a full restructuring of Huawei’s operations to be more future-proof by embracing the inherent agility and ease of deployment that comes with a mature cloud network. Xu noted that Huawei is already in the process of converting their backend operations and service layers to a more cloud-friendly format, but that this move is still in the earliest of phases. Xu also made sure to mention that the transition to a full cloud infrastructure and a matching service layer will take some time, likely coinciding with similar moves throughout the industry. He capped off his speech by touching on the importance of deploying cloud services in the quickest and most efficient way possible, saying of competitors that didn’t embrace the cloud, “…we can see what happened to them”.