Despite well-known issues with a number of western governments, Huawei's enterprise business group has continued to grow and meet internal targets, said Eric Xu, the company’s current rotating CEO.
While market concerns did not ultimately hamper growth, he did admit that the company had had to work harder in communicating to customers the value that Huawei solutions could bring.
But he added, the enterprise market continued to show a huge opportunity and he was confident that Huawei would continue to do well in it. “Part of the reason is that all of the work we’ve put into place over the past 20 years for the carrier business can be used in the enterprise space,” he added.
The company for example, would continue to focus on its key portfolio and not move into new areas like content and applications.
But the engagement model was vastly different from the direct sales sort of the carrier market and Huawei would continue to work to develop its partner and channel market to engage customers.
Forrester analyst Frank Liu said that Huawei need to enable partnerships and cooperate with SIs and ISVs to create communities around different software platforms. “To their advantage, Huawei enterprise solutions will be a more cost-effective choice to build new infrastructure or refresh networks for enterprises,” he said.
But Adeline Phua Senior Research Manager, Enterprise Computing, Networking IDC Asia Pacific said that Huawei’s value proposition whether in the service provider or the handset market, has always been that of a 'value' player. She added, “The vendor needs to have a clear message on whether this value proposition will be applied to Huawei Enterprise solutions. An inconsistent message might be jarring for customers.”
Phua said that on the enterprise side, Huawei is still a challenger to the likes of Cisco and HP. There are a few things Huawei needs to stabilize before business can grow more aggressively.” Huawei needs to recruit more partners and work on creating a partner program which will entice enterprise partners and protect these partner's investments, particularly outside PRC,” she said.