Huawei is moving to establish an industry alliance to foster innovation and drive digital businesses. How do you envision this alliance in terms of participation, goals, etc?
The transformation to digital business is non-trivial. It is crucial to collaborate with partners to win the future. The alliance should be open to all business partners, including CSPs, vendors, application developers and technology innovators such as open source communities, third-party service providers and OTT players. The main objective of this alliance is to foster a healthy, win-win business partnership to help the telco industry and other enterprises to transform their business models, operation models, architectures and organizations to become lean, agile digital enterprises, and enable an open digital business-enabling ecosystem for developing innovative digital services and providing the best digital experience to all users including consumers, enterprise, partners and operators.
What would be the benefits of such an alliance?
The alliance will benefit from the diversity of business needs and technology capabilities to maximize business opportunities and lower costs. For example, it can leverage competence from multiple types of industries to build up core capabilities, collaborate on business application development to roll out innovative digital services, discover new business models to monetize the core assets of partners, and lower costs through open-source technologies and shorten time-to-market of new features
What are the core areas that telcos should be focused on to ensure smooth and successful digital transformation?
The main goal of digital transformation is new flexible business models. To achieve this, the key enabler of a successful digital business is to transform legacy operations into agile digital operations, which will enable digital services such as big data, IoT and cloud, deliver omni-user engagement and a digital user experience, and enable infrastructure automation, which is backed up by an open operations architecture and flat organization, as well as competence of personnel.
Alliances aside, what is Huawei’s main strategy to enable digital operations transformation for telcos?
As the largest ICT solution provider in the telco industry, Huawei likes to establish long term strategic partnerships, work as a primary systems integration partner, provide best-of-breed solutions and supporting operational services in collaboration with leading IT and CT companies, and share the risks to build up a digital ecosystem and win the future together. For example, Huawei has been a major contributor to open-source communities such as OpenStack. Huawei has established a developer community with more than 4,000 members. And Huawei is collaborating with Accenture, IBM and SAP in the enterprise market. Also, Huawei set up our Open NFV lab in 10s locations that has more than 600 partners working on IoT, cloud and mobile broadband applications.