Clear Skies Ahead

Huawei's Connect conference gathered 20,000 IT professionals in Shanghai to showcase a number of solutions that embody the company’s vision to become one of the world’s top cloud players within the next five years. Glesni Holland reports from Shanghai New International Expo Centre.

“ The cloud is a key cornerstone of the intelligent world,” said Huawei’s rotating CEO, Guo Ping, in his opening keynote of Huawei Connect 2017.

The company’s annual flagship event attracted IT professionals, thought leaders and analysts from 150 countries to hone in on the fact that for many organisations, cloud adoption is no longer an option but an imperative. “Because of this, clouds around the globe are beginning to converge – becoming more and more centralised,” added Ping.

He went on to highlight the company’s main goal of becoming one of the five major cloud players in the world within the next 3-5 years. “We’ve got the technology and know-how to do it, but our business model is not to monetise user data,” he said. “We do not develop applications or touch the data in our public clouds. We provide technologies and services to help users monetise their data.”

Quoting Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, Ping said, “In this era of great opportunities, we refuse to be opportunistic. Huawei has never taken shortcuts and never will, and the same applies to Huawei Cloud. We’ll keep our feet on the ground and continue to invest and work with partners to build our cloud alliance until we have secured our position as one of the world’s five clouds.”