Cloud will redefine core competitiveness of all industrial sectors

In an era where digital technology evolves at a rapid pace, the ability to remain agile is essential to navigating the fast-moving technological landscape. 

With ever-changing requirements, growing market demand, and a great variety of service providers, how can public and private organisations equip themselves to embrace digitalisation? 

According to Huawei’s President for Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, Jacqueline Shi, the answer is in the cloud. 

“The new cloud technology will redefine the core competitiveness of the industry,” she says, adding that what sets Huawei Cloud apart, is its innovative culture. 

“No innovation, no future.” 

At the sidelines of Huawei Cloud’s Singapore Summit 2024, Shi talks with GovInsider about Huawei Cloud’s innovation-driven practices and the role of the cloud in digital transformation. 

Supporting the transformation journey 

Since cloud is an abstract concept for non-technical customers, building a strong relationship with a cloud provider can be difficult.  

“But that is not our culture,” Shi says. Huawei Cloud aims to make the digital transformation journey smoother by providing support in different areas and setting up local support teams. 

The main challenges that organisations face in their digital transformation journey include adopting new technology platforms, modernising the software layer, and having a clear route for data migration, Shi says. 

She shares that Huawei Cloud helps its customers to manage their data and ease the migration journey with container solutions like the Ubiquitous Cloud Native Service (UCS), which provides expertise to deploy and manage software on different platforms with intelligent traffic distribution. 

As the container solutions help with data management, “customers can get a very easy migration from legacy platform to a new one,” Shi adds. 

Hybrid cloud options 

For industry players that require an additional level of security, Huawei Cloud enables their digital transformation with hybrid cloud solutions. 

“This is a unique solution for Huawei Cloud, because we adopt the public cloud technology, but we can [offer] private deployment,” she notes. 

The key to fulfilling Huawei Cloud’s vision of “everything as a service” is to provide application programming interface (API) integration into one simple template so that industry customers and partners can just adopt it.  

“The vertical customers don’t need to understand complicated technologies,” says Shi. This liberates customers from navigating the complexity of the process, allowing them to focus on meeting requirements and executing their operations more seamlessly. 

Application-centric approach 

Shi notes that the cloud journey has moved from a results-centric approach to an application-centric stage. This means a more focused approach toward building new architecture that is enables applications to run more efficiently than before. 

In the cloud native era, adopting an application-centric approach is important to support the applications that run on the cloud, Shi adds. 

She shares that in shifting towards this new approach, Huawei Cloud also switched from virtual machines to containers. 

Now, Huawei is leading the cloud native journey with services and solutions based on container technology, supported with a new architecture that enables faster, more reliable and more scalable software delivery. 

Working closely with customers 

Shi explains that what drives Huawei Cloud’s redefinition of technologies is the feedback from their customers. The local teams are key for this purpose.  

“We have a strong team to understand the direction of new technologies [paired with] a customer-centric culture to understand our customers’ requirements globally.” 

She adds that there are different local teams dedicated for different industries, with members from Huawei as well as direct industry players to “bundle the industry knowledge with our technology knowledge”. 

This allows Huawei Cloud to better understand the customers’ voices and meet their requirements effectively, she says. 

What is next for Huawei Cloud? 

“We are trying to grow faster,” says Shi.  

She adds that Huawei Cloud’s capability in Singapore is top in its global markets, but there is room for improvement in other regions. 

“In Singapore, if you test our cloud, you can get the best latency within five milliseconds, everywhere. That’s important to support real time services,” she explains. “So, we are confident to bring more value to our global customers.” 

To do this, the target is to “synchronise all the most cutting-edge technologies” globally and build a seamless network to access all customers—a global ecosystem of Huawei Cloud, she shares. 

With innovative solutions from infrastructure data, AI, and digital avatars, Huawei Cloud is leading the digital transformation journey for its global customers, Shi says. 

Supporting the local ecosystem 

“Sometimes we consider ourselves as a local company, [because] we have worked here for more than 25 years,” she says. But with that comes an added responsibility. 

As Huawei Cloud grows in Singapore, it is important to consider how to best contribute to the country’s local ecosystem, Shi notes. 

There are plans to enhance training programmes with local partners for technical upskilling. Previous initiatives like Huawei ICT competition have provided certifications for talent development in the ICT industry. 

“That’s a target for us, to train more local talents,” says Shi.  

To date, Huawei Cloud has trained over 3,000 developers in Singapore, and produced over 2,200 ICT talents in collaboration with educational institutions.  

She adds that supporting local startups is another key area of collaboration to help them “embrace the global markets” and open the digital ecosystem.  

In 2022, Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA) and Huawei Cloud launched the Spark Incubator entrepreneurship initiative to support the growth and expansion of Singapore-based start-ups. The incubator sparked 180 startups in FinTech, Web3 and Enterprise software.