Connectivity in 2020 has taken on a whole new meaning. It has become more essential than ever before, as individuals, businesses, and governments have leaned on their technology to stay connected as seamlessly as possible during the global COVID-19 pandemic. With the importance of technology and digital transformation elevated to a new level, President of the Huawei Middle East region, Charles Yang, says that the next point of focus is in creating value with synergy across five tech domains: connectivity, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), computing, and industry applications – all of which are enabled by the roll-out of 5G networks.
The ability to harness these five tech domains will be the key to success in the 21st century, and developers are the driving force advancing this process. According to Mr. Yang, Huawei is planning to invest USD1.5 billion into these developers over the next five years, as part of the company’s Huawei Developer Program 2.0 that was launched in 2019.
This all ties into Huawei’s aim to growing the information and communications technology (ICT) value chain through talent and open ecosystems, something the company has long advocated for. Earlier this year, Huawei released several new platforms and development suites aimed at a growing base of some 1.8 million developers in the region and around the world. Huawei confirmed that it has partnered with an initial group of 72 universities to ensure a formidable foundation of future talent for IT innovation. To add to this, Huawei continues to prompt more innovation and collaboration across markets through their 5G OpenLab with the intention of creating an open ecosystem that will further ICT development across the region.
Huawei believes that the key to developer success is fast deployment, promotion, and monetization of scenario-specific applications. The company thus offers two major platforms for distributing applications: HUAWEI CLOUD Marketplace and Huawei AppGallery. These allow applications to quickly reach potential customers and users all over the world, and also offer solid business support programs.
Traditionally, application developers create all the code from scratch. This means a developer must be an expert programmer. To enable more people to develop applications, HUAWEI CLOUD has launched a low-code development platform called ROMA AppCube to empower developers to build applications within a modular architecture, through simple drag-and-drop tools. Moreover, one of the most common problems with application development is that the programmers who write the code may actually know very little about the business, so the applications they build may need a lot of changes to accurately match business needs. ModelArts, HUAWEI CLOUD's AI development platform, now provides +300 industry knowledge models.
Huawei’s recently unveiled Kunpeng motherboard 2.0 supports this vision by offering a new pattern of hardware openness helps partners innovate and deal with differentiated requirements. The Kunpeng BoostKit further strengthens application enablement by providing open source high-performance components, acceleration software packages, and tools for mainstream scenarios. Additionally, the Kunpeng DevKit also supports the full-pipeline development, ranging from code scanning and porting to compilation and performance tuning.
“We can create the technology needed to enable digital transformation, but we must also have ample talent in communities across the world who can not only implement these solutions, but build on them and add further value to the digital economy as well as driving the digital transformation journey,” said Mr. Yang. “This is why Huawei is committed to investing in talent development, as well as to open ecosystems that give people the tools they need to fully explore and utilize the full potential of a connected world.”
In line with this, the new Huawei Talent Online 2.0 platform offers a new type of learning experience to the Middle East as well as further afield, providing a hands-on and practical approach. It encourages convenient learning through online experiments while optimizing partner registration, class and course opening, and operations. The platform houses 217 high quality courses and has attracted 800,000 users around the world. There are 1,276 Huawei ICT Academies and Huawei Authorized Learning Partners registered on the platform, expanding the scope of courses and the range of knowledge available to users. So far in 2020, Huawei has certified over 90,000 users, and over 50,000 people from 62 countries participated in the platform's "Learn On" action plan, pursuing ICT learning during the pandemic.
As stated by Mr. Yang, “Not only do these learning opportunities contribute to the development of the ICT talent ecosystem, they also provide respected and valuable certifications that can greatly improve our students’ career prospects. Our vision for the future is to expand our talent ecosystem. In the next five years we plan to have 10,000 Huawei ICT Academies, 1.5 million annual ICT learners, and an additional 350,000 certification participants each year.”
Naturally this expanded talent pool will help to create more value across the five tech domains by propelling digitalization across all sectors. Connectivity today means productivity, and this is why industries placing higher requirements on connectivity than ever before and are moving beyond their cloud business strategy trend to think ‘intelligent’ business, which is driven by the implementation of AI.
The journey to becoming an intelligent, digital-first business, however, is traditionally not a smooth one. In recognizing that industries need to overcome multiple challenges before going digital, Huawei introduced Intelligent Twins, which is the first time a systematic reference architecture has been proposed for the intelligent upgrade of governments and enterprises. Leveraging cloud as a foundation and AI as a core, and collaboration across the cloud, network, edge, and device, Intelligent Twins enable an intelligent, open ecosystem that is capable of all-dimensional perception, all-domain collaboration, precise judgement, and continuous evolution. It delivers a smart experience for people, cities, and enterprises in all scenarios, and enables Huawei’s customers and partners to build their own intelligent solutions to enable digital transformation across industries for all-scenario intelligence and unlock new value.
“I truly believe Intelligent Twins represents the ideal solution for public and private sector entities across the Middle East,” said Mr. Yang. “Digital transformation and the development of the digital economy are priorities for many if not all governments throughout the region. This is a solution that can help to achieve this ambition, by making digitalization more accessible than ever before. We have defined ubiquitous gigabit connectivity, a deterministic connectivity experience, and hyper-automation as the three major characteristics of intelligent connectivity, and this is what Intelligent Twins offers for the paradigm shift towards national and industrial digital transformation.”
Mr. Yang added that: “Huawei is willing to work with our partners across the Middle East to not only assist on the digital transformation journey, but to promote digital inclusion, particularly in fields such as education and environmental protection. Technology can be used to provide access to quality education or to help conserve our environment, and this is something that we are very keen to contribute to.” The company does this through its TECH4ALL platform.
At the heart of all this is, of course, 5G. Roll-out is ongoing throughout the Middle East, and Huawei believes that the pandemic conditions of 2020 will encourage more investment in building 5G networks in order to kick-start digital transformation and ignite the digital economy. 5G combined with AI will revolutionize all industries. The telecommunications sector, in particular, is one field that stands to benefit immensely from the combined potential of 5G and AI. This is especially true as AI capabilities are supporting the push towards 5G adaptation through the automation of network operations. With AI capabilities, telecommunications operators can better streamline their service operations and deliver more engaging and reliable 5G experiences to customers. AI will transform the connectivity industry and drive intelligent upgrades in all industries.
When these technologies are also combined with cloud computing platforms and big data, they empower each other to unleash even greater value. That value will play a critical role in countries’ digital transformation and the achievement of national development visions over the coming decades.
“The digital economy will be a new driving force of economic and societal development, making it not only a highlight of national economies but a necessity in today’s connected world,” said Mr. Yang. “Not only does it offer wide-ranging benefits across society, but it has a growth rate high than that of the overall traditional economy in each country. We believe that creating value through synergy across the five tech domains, and by investing in talent development and the accessibility of ICT education, we can establish strong national ICT ecosystems that will enable countries to reap the full benefits of digitalization.”
This vision, Mr. Yang says, is what makes Huawei a pioneer, as the company seeks to bring digital to every person, home, and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world.