At Huawei Global Carrier Cloud Transformation Summit held today in Shenzhen, China, Huawei Carrier BG executives Peng Song, President of Huawei Carrier BG Marketing and Solution Sales Dept, and Chen Xuejun, Director of Huawei Carrier IT Marketing & Solution Sales, highlighted opportunities for operators to adopt cloud transformation, followed by the announcement of Huawei’s first suite of global scenario-based cloud solutions for carriers at its exclusive Carrier Cloud Transformation Summit.
From his side, Peng Song, spoke about the company’s newest plans for operator cloud transformation. He explained how Huawei is excited to support these transformations by helping increase network value, accelerate service innovation, and optimize telecom operations to unleash the benefits of connectivity.
Cloud is becoming a crucial part of industrial digital transformation, and is now considered a key economic factor because of its ability to reshape the economic structure and market landscape of individual industries.
The telecom industry has already entered a critical stage of its own cloud transformation, resulting in many new opportunities and challenges. 15% of operators are expected to develop and fully implement a comprehensive cloud strategy by the end of 2023, resulting in a telecommunications cloud market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. To support this expansion and take advantage of the new markets these technologies are creating, operators must prioritize the construction of more efficient and agile ICT infrastructure.
Peng believes that operators’ cloud transformation should be based on communication technology (CT) and that operators should be leveraging the unique strengths of the telecom industry and cloud transformation to magnify the value of their networks and services.
He emphasized that there are three areas operators must focus on to seize the opportunities being presented:
First, in terms of network value, operators need to expand network boundaries with the cloud and improve network value in the B2B market to make sure these advancements benefit more customers. Networks are operators’ core assets, and operators can take this advantage and advance cloud transformation in a synergistic way.
Second, in terms of digital innovation, operators need to build cloud platforms for digital service innovation that they can use to launch new services more quickly. Collaborative cloud platforms that bridge telecom services and digital services will further accelerate innovation and improve their customer acquisition capabilities.
In Europe, Huawei has already helped operators migrate development environments, test environments, and hundreds of services to the Huawei Cloud platform. This has helped some operators shorten the time-to-market for new services by 75% through the use of an agile development platform and telecom PaaS capabilities.
Third, in terms of telecom operations, operators need to use pre-integrated cloud solutions specifically designed for the telecom industry to support sustainable growth of their primary business. Telecom cloud transformation requires cloud platforms that have a distributed architecture able to meet the data security and management requirements of adaptive telecom service architectures. A rational timeline of cloud transformation is also necessary to ensure services are robustly migrated to the cloud.
In Asia, Huawei has deployed distributed clouds to handle a diverse range of operator services and features, and used Huawei’s distributed data lake to conduct correlated data analyses for different services, improving the 5G package marketing success rate by 180%.
Peng closed out his address stating that, to succeed in cloud transformation and provide quality services to customers, it is important that operators establish strategic partnerships with those who deeply understand the telecom industry and knows how to leverage the strengths of telecom. By the end of 2021, Huawei had worked extensively with more than 120 operators globally on cloud services. Huawei has committed to further investing into ICT and leveraging its localized service capabilities worldwide to accelerate operators’ cloud transformation and unleash the benefits of connectivity.
Also speaking at the summit, Chen Xuejun announced Huawei’s first suite of global scenario-based cloud solutions for carriers, following his keynote entitled Huawei Cloud: Enabling New Growth for Carriers. These solutions focus on monetizing networks, innovating services, and optimizing operations to help carriers embrace cloud transformation and growth acceleration.
With advances in 5G, cloud computing, big data, and edge computing, cloud transformation has become the future of telecom carriers. According to Gartner, carriers around the world will increase their IT infrastructure investment in cloud transformation at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27% in the next five years. Huawei has distilled its over three decades of telecom experience and cloud expertise into the following key factors for carrier cloud transformation: first, the selection of a transformation strategy by factoring in a carrier’s own advantages; second, the planning of a transformation path considering data security, system stability, and service agility; and third, the selection of a trusted, experienced, and competent partner for win-win collaboration.
Huawei builds these three factors into its carrier cloud solutions.
First, Network + Cloud expands the scope of network monetization. Huawei’s network insights and cloud-network collaboration solutions enable carriers to expand their service and market boundaries for maximum network value. For enterprise customers in China, Huawei Cloud provides a Cloud + Network + Security deployment solution to expand the coverage of traditional solutions with integrated ICT for a multiplier boost in value.
Second, Service + Cloud accelerates service innovation. Huawei Cloud leverages Huawei’s experience in the telecom industry and its advanced cloud platform capabilities to make carrier development agile and bring innovation faster to market. In Africa, a customer deployed the mobile wallet platform on Huawei Cloud, shortening service rollout from months to weeks. The Huawei Cloud ecosystem further shortened this rollout from months to just one week.
Third, Operation + Cloud drives operations efficiency. Huawei Cloud pre-optimized cloud solution powers basic telecom services, expands the user scale, and catalyzes the continuous growth of main services. An Asian carrier counted that only 10% of its 5G subscribers are using 5G service packages and 5G network coverage. Huawei uses the distributed data lake solution for collaborative analysis of business support system (BSS) data, improving operations efficiency and boosting the marketing conversion for 5G provisioning by 180%.
Chen Xuejun concluded his keynote with Huawei Cloud’s commitment. “The key to carrier cloud transformation lies in smarter use of the cloud for networks, services, and operations. Huawei Cloud will work with global carriers to transform and open up new growth space.”