During Gartner’s annual Symposium ITxp 2012, IT News Africa sat down with technology company Huawei’s Lauren Fan, president for the East and Southern African region, Naeiym Omar, IP Product Manager and Sophia Liu, communications manager, to talk about the company’s expansion plans in Africa, success in the telecommunications industry and CloudEngine Series Switches.
1. What are Huawei’s growth plans for the rest of Africa?
Our new business group was established two years ago and has its roots in Huawei’s telecommunications industry. It has had steady growth and is now the number one provider for carrier solutions for Africa. What we hope to achieve is to leverage off the company to become the leading solutions provider. We have already put in huge infrastructure for governments in Tanzania and Nigeria specifically. In Nigeria alone, we have supplied infrastructure for 37 provinces. Our next big push in Africa will be the Enterprise division. One of our biggest milestones was when the Ideos became the best-selling phone in Kenya. But we do have healthy competition in the enterprise sector. Our biggest competition is Cisco and HP, but we are also learning from them. We also work with IBM, and aren’t adverse to working with partners. In the carrier space we are number one and in enterprise we are number two, we have sold over 5million routers worldwide and are strong in all technology sectors.
2. Huawei has been one of the top ICT companies in IP, mobile and fixed networks. What do you ascribe your success to?
We have dedicated staff and we are focused on providing an excellent service. We also recieve an incredible amount of dedication from staff and partners – we have a win-win relationship with all of them. Over 45% goes in R&D, and we have twenty-two R&D centres worldwide that allows us to be at the forefront of technology. We are a global company that has taken technology to a local level. We can provide a full end-to-end solution – and it’s very seldom that we can’t help a customer. We are better priced than competitors, our products are also totally interoperable and customers like us because we go the extra mile.
3. What will be the next big trend in Business Solutions for Huawei?
Everything will be moving to the cloud, which represents a cost-saving for everyone, and it’s definitely moving to towards virtualisation of desktops. It’s where the world is moving to – we are at the forefront of that, and we support all the technology. We are aiming to release services now for added value, which has huge cost-saving components, while moving into more distributed cloud services. All the technology is going to the same place – cloud computing is the main focus.
4. Please elaborate on the CloudEngine Series Switches and how it builds stable network architecture.
A scalable data centre network is integral to the business success of enterprises in order to adapt to fast-evolving ICT trends. Drawing on our extensive R&D expertise and industry standards collaboration work, we are excited to be launching the CloudEngine series which will provide enterprises with that flexibility and bring greater benefits to our customers. It can transfer at a rate of 48TB/second, which is three times the industry standard. Currently we have three models, all converging with fibre channels and can support 16 interfaces over one fibre. They support all virtualisations, and are all cloud-ready.
5. Huawei was recently selected to provide advanced IP microwave solution for the next-generation LTE backhaul networks of Movicel in Angola. Are you in discussions to provide similar services for other African countries?
We are already in most of the African countries, and even as early as 2004 we were number one in Mauritius. But we do have a strong presence in Africa with other operators like Safaricom in Kenya, and have great relationships with Africa’s top mobile service operators. We are present in over 50 countries in Africa – which makes us unique as we have an on-the-ground presence. We have three regional headquarters in the 25 countries in Southern and East Africa.
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
