Huawei Cloud continues to build strong ecosystem foundations for partners

Artificial Intelligence (AI), deep partner collaboration, and building a strong ecosystem foundation were championed as next-level growth engines to new opportunities in industry digitisation at the recent Huawei Cloud APAC Partner Connection Summit 2024.

Huawei Cloud Asia Pacific hosted approximately 500 participants comprising partners from over 13 countries at its invitation-only partner event, held under the theme 'Accelerate Intelligence with Everything as a Service'. The annual summit took place on March 26 and 27 at Huawei's Songshan Lake Campus, in Dongguan, China.

In the summit's opening address, President of Huawei Cloud Computing Global Marketing and Sales Service Dept Jacqueline Shi attributed the tremendous growth in the last four years to the immense support of its partners. She highlighted that in the Asia Pacific region, there was a 300% increase in the number of partners with annual revenue exceeding $10 million, $5 million, and $1 million.

"KooVerse, our global infrastructure, covers 30 Regions and 84 availability zones and we are still expanding our coverage. We strive to build Huawei Cloud KooVerse into the bedrock for global partners to quickly explore local business in a secure, compliant manner, and empower customers with the best performance and experience. In the past few years, Huawei Cloud has been investing in technologies. We are the leading cloud service provider in Big Data & AI. Huawei will continue as an innovative company and provide customers and partners with the most advanced technologies and solutions," she said.

Jacqueline further elaborated, "Huawei Cloud has accumulated excellent experience in the digital transformation of China's Internet and government & enterprise industries, we hope to bring these best practices from China to our customers and partners on the global stage. We hope we can help build a localized ecosystem for governments, enterprises and partners in countries and regions outside China."

In his keynote speech, President of Huawei Cloud Computing Global Ecosystem Dept, Ken Kang outlined the key areas that will drive the Huawei Cloud ecosystem strategy for 2024. "At present, we have more than 45,000 partners worldwide to provide customers with end-to-end services. Through both online and offline sales channels, we have contributed thousands of sales opportunities to our partners and achieved an overall sales growth of 123% through Huawei Cloud Store KooGallery, forming a win-win situation."

Ken elaborated that the six industries of focus are finance, retail, carrier, healthcare, education, and automobile, where more than 100 joint solutions will be built based on customer requirements to accelerate the digital transformation of industry customers. Additionally, a Digital Transformation and System Integration partner program centering on consulting and industry Systems Integrators (SIs) will be kicked off. Manpower resources for partners will be increased via the deployment of Dedicated Partner Success Managers in Huawei offices outside of China.

Huawei Cloud APAC President Zeng Xingyun zeroed in on the fast breakthroughs Huawei Cloud has scored in the Big Data & AI markets in his keynote presentation. In 2023, it is expected that the overall cloud business in Asia Pacific will grow by 77%, the number of big data and AI projects will increase fivefold, and the revenue will increase tenfold. In the past four years, the revenue of Huawei Cloud in the Asia Pacific has increased twentyfold, making it the fastest-growing mainstream cloud service provider in the Asia Pacific.

"We will focus on 6 star products and solutions, including Huawei Cloud Stack, Big Data & AI, Media Services, Database, Security and PaaS, to deepen cooperation with top professional partners. In addition, we will provide 15% to 25% in extra incentives to help partners improve their professional service and sales capabilities and develop key products and solutions in market segments."

Meanwhile, in another keynote address, President of Huawei Cloud APAC Sales Partner Development Dept Nicole Lu mentioned that in 2024, Huawei Cloud will continue to strengthen the win-win model for partners in the Asia Pacific region entrust partners to help us build and develop the market, and enable partners to directly reach customers, so as to explore business opportunities and expand the business scope.

To help organisations leverage on AI, Huawei Cloud's Chief Product Officer William Fang in his keynote emphasised the two-prong strategy offered by Huawei: 'Cloud for AI' and 'AI for Cloud'.

The 'Cloud for AI' strategy helps organisations ensure their cloud infrastructure capably supports the effective use of AI. In 'AI for Cloud', Pangu Models are bridging the chasm between AI and industry needs with powerful scenario and industry-specific models. For example, the Pangu automotive model provides AI-assisted vehicle design while the Pangu weather model enables typhoon tracking.