Huawei to scale up partnerships in Asia Pacific to boost storage capabilities

“The Asia Pacific region is quite diverse when it comes to digital progress – some countries are far ahead, while others are just starting their journey. But most of the countries here are strategically integrating digital transformation into national blueprints and making tangible progress in terms of implementation,” said Aaron Wang, Vice President of Huawei APAC Enterprise Business Group.

Wang said this at the tech giant’s Asia Pacific Partners Conference 2023, which brought together more than 1,200 of its partners across 10 countries across the region to achieve shared digital transformation and growth goals.

According to research from IDC, global spending on digital transformation could hit US$3.4 trillion by 2026. This is why the China-based tech giant is eager to work with partners to ride on this wave to add more value to the region, highlighted Wang.

GovInsider speaks exclusively to Peter Zhou, President of Huawei IT Product Line, on the opportunities that lie for Huawei’s APAC partners in the near future.

Entering different industries

Zhou shares that what encourages his team is that Huawei’s partners are starting to adopt its products across different domains, such as healthcare and finance. At a media roundtable last week, Wang detailed that Huawei is currently focusing on five key industry profiles: education, healthcare, financial services, energy, and internet service providers.

Storage is critical across all these industries. “In hospitals, our products are helping to provide better patient experiences. In finance, banks are using our storage systems for core transactions. Huawei’s high performance and reliability means that our partners will never have their businesses be interrupted by latency,” says Zhou.

Banks in China experience high pressure for reliable IT infrastructure and design during holiday seasons, when users across APAC and the world look to Chinese suppliers for internet shopping.

“This puts a lot of strain on the IT infrastructure and network for the banking system in China, which is why almost all the banks in China have chosen a multi-cloud infrastructure to utilise the advantages of the internet, while still maintaining the traditional way of doing their business,” adds Zhou.

Similarly in healthcare, the traditional elements of caregiving are retained, but patients are now able to check all their health records through their mobile devices, while doctors can conduct remote consultations and diagnoses. This spells a big opportunity for the country to fully utilise its medical and healthcare resources using innovation, he says.

Another application for Huawei’s storage solutions in the healthcare sector is to support genome sequencing. In West China Hospital, for instance, Huawei’s OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage provides stellar performance that helps the hospital achieve the analysis of whole genome sequencing results in just 7 minutes. This is three and a half times faster than the hospital’s legacy platform and a whopping 180 times faster than traditional genome sequencing platforms.

With the enablement of genome sequencing, the hospital is able to provide more proactive and personalised healthcare to China’s citizens.   

But the diversity of industry regulations is one of the key challenges that Huawei had to overcome. “Each market has its own unique characteristics, customer preferences, and regulatory environments. Navigating these differences requires a deep understanding of each market and an ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances,” said Wang during the partner conference.

Deepening roots in Asia

Asia Pacific is one of the areas in which Huawei’s storage business is expanding rapidly, Zhou tells GovInsider.

From 2016 to 2022, Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage has been listed as a Leader in IT consulting firm Gartner’s Magic Quadrant market research reports – a listing only given to storage providers in with demonstrated abilities to drive and execute the acceptance of new technologies.

In 2023,  Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage was awarded the “Voice of the Customer for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage” for having the best customer experience feedback platform.

“Not only are we intending to collaborate with our partners on a product level, we are also trying to introduce their ecosystems to mainland China, which is a big market,” Zhou says.

Huawei is in a unique position to bridge partnerships through shared cultures, languages, and markets with the rest of APAC, Zhou highlights. “I have full confidence in the prospects that our partners in APAC have with Huawei in the coming years,” he tells GovInsider.