Shared success
With the IT ecosystem seen to evolve into an open and diverse model, managing cooperation should take precedence over managing competition. While boosting one’s core competitiveness and continuously innovating within the organization may help an enterprise grow fast, Guo said, “cooperation will make it go far. The concepts of cooperation and competition are inseparable in this ecosystem.”
Traditionally, enterprises are good at competition, but today they also need to be strong in terms of optimization capability. All parties in the chains need to leverage advantages to create value for their customers. “It’s not our competition that is our adversary, but the entire era we find ourselves in. And the coming intelligent world is an unpredictable adversary,” stated Guo.
“Benefit sharing is the driving force behind the evolution of the ecosystem, and the result of its successful development,” he pointed out, adding that for Huawei’s part, the company seeks to tap only one percent of the massive digital transformation pie, leaving the rest to its partners. The company has also been establishing industry and business alliances to foster collective industry growth and ensure customer success. Huawei is also actively involved in open source communities to further community-based collaboration. It is also keen on introducing more players into the market by establishing a robust developers’ platform to activate innovation and make the ecosystem flourish.
Brian Krzanich, the CEO of Intel, shared a similar vision in his keynote. “We’re moving towards a world where boundaries between the digital and the physical are eroding, where computing is truly mobile and ubiquitous, and wherever you go, data will flow out of your device,” he suggested.
This future, according to Krzanich, represents a huge opportunity for industries in general and companies individually that truly embrace the digital transformation. “And all of this requires the cloud,” he asserted, adding that succeeding in this era of being connected and data-driven will boil down to whether an organization truly embraces the connected, data-driven, cloud world.
As our world becomes more digital, no activity will happen as a result of isolation. Krzanich explained, “Everything has a connection, has its data flow between one location and another. The app on your phone, the turbine in the jet you fly from point to point, the buildings in this city—all are connected to the cloud which gathers and interprets this data, and from which come valuable insights that lead to better user experiences.”
The ongoing collaboration between Huawei and Intel concisely illustrates the potential of this new model where ecological alliances are being leveraged, along with their companies’ core competencies. “Today’s data networks are built on peoples’ devices, with data created by humans. Today, the average person produces 600 to 700 megabytes of data and by 2020, that will come up to 1.5 gigabytes of information off their devices. That’s already a lot of data, but then you consider all these connected machines,” said Krzanich. The average autonomous car, he cites as an example, produces 4,000 gigabytes of data a day.
“By 2020, one car will produce as much data as 3,000 people. There’s going to be a flood of data—and that’s going to be a huge network load but also a huge opportunity to optimize and create value,” he said.
It’s exactly why Intel is focusing on end-to-end solutions that are built on really strong ecosystem partnerships. Said Krzanich, “We at Intel recognize that this really requires a 5G network that’s much more flexible, able to go to many locations, and this is much more than an evolutionary step from 4G. Our partnership with Huawei, which is one of the global leaders of wireless infrastructures, is a great example of that ecosystem partnership. Our work with Huawei and other industry partners on open platforms and global standards will help to accelerate early 5G technology developments and make cloud computing more accessible and easier to deploy.”