Huawei’s Principal Architect at its CTO office, Patrick Low, has declared that the Chinese vendor remains dedicated and committed to working with its partners in order to empower digital transformation services across all industries.
Telecom Review managed to secure an exclusive interview with Low, who outlined his roles and responsibilities within the CTO office, discussed the meaning of Industry Community Clouds - and highlighted Huawei’s approach to promoting a single digital economy in ASEAN.
Can you outline to us in detail what your primary responsibilities and duties are as Huawei’s Principal Architect at its CTO Office?
The key responsibilities of the CTO office include defining IT systems architecture to support the company's business strategy. Tactically speaking, we collectively ensure that the company's technology objectives are aligned with its business goals, and to do that well requires one to hold an in-depth knowledge of the company's business areas as well as the abilities to talk to both technical developers and business managers on relevant matters like industries trends, products qualities and recognizing operations patterns so as to we keep abreast of the development and changes happening in the industries.
There is a consensus now prevalent amongst cloud experts that cloud services need to meet specific industry requirements in a more comprehensive way. This has been labelled as Industry Community Clouds. Can you explain to us in more detail what Industry Community Clouds mean?
From a technical standpoint, community cloud is a multi-tenant platform that is accessible only for a specific subset of customers. A good example will be the government agencies/entities sharing common characteristics like security, auditability and privacy concerns/requirements using a highly-regulated cloud platform governed by a trusted entity. Such an approach gives users much more confidence in the platform that they use to deploy their sensitive workloads. Additionally, community cloud providers are much more willing to bend and adjust to the requirements that might be difficult to fulfill in a public cloud scenario.
Community cloud is an important component of the overall hybrid cloud marketplace. It helps to address industry specific requirements at the same time delivering the value of a public cloud. It’s a great example of a “glocal” approach where the providers with global experience delivers services tailored to the needs of a local market.
Collectively, ASEAN is the sixth largest economy in the world. In your expert opinion, how can the ISP industry speed up digital transformation and promote a single digital economy in ASEAN?
The digital integration of ASEAN will promote rapid growth of the digital economy, including safe and smart city solutions, to stimulate economic development and inform social intelligence. As ASEAN sets the stage for a single digital economy to harness its full economic potential, it is crucial for key players within the ICT sector to collaborate and contribute to the robust infrastructure necessary to accelerate ASEAN’s growth.
Huawei is dedicated to working with partners across industries to empower their digital transformation and enrich their services to thrive in the new ICT era. As a case in point, Huawei is working with Converge, an ISP partner in the Philippines, to build an innovative next-generation network. Converge’s legacy network had too many layers with an unclear architecture, affecting the fast rollout and configuration of new services. Huawei created a three-year network construction solution and formulated a service deployment plan so that Converge’s new network is elastic, simple, and future oriented to adapt to new services. Huawei has and will continue to develop products aimed at equipping ISP customers with the technology to effectively power ASEAN’s single digital market ambition.
Can you highlight some of the cloud computing solutions and innovations you showcased and launched at the event?
In this event, Huawei has launched the FusionCloud 6.3 Cloud Infrastructure Solution which taps on cloud computing and big data technologies to provide resource pooling and full-stack cloud service capabilities to effectively address business challenges and enabling industry digital transformation. We are deeply honored and proud that this solution has been awarded “Best Cloud Infrastructure Solution” by at the 2018 Information Management Awards organized by NetworkWorld Asia (NWA). From the votes garnered during the judging process, it bears testimony to the innovation and responsiveness of our solution in meeting the growing needs of end-user organizations due to the burgeoning adoption and application of big data, IoT, cybersecurity, the hybrid cloud and AI.
Huawei has just announced the launch of its Intelligent Computing initiative, an AI driven computing platform meant for digital transformation of businesses and enterprises. What impact will this initiative have on Huawei’s Cloud Data Centers attempts to evolve from server intelligence to data center intelligence?
Composed of simple words but profound in meaning, the Intelligent (or Boundless) Computing concept literally means breaking through the boundaries of physical constraints. This is something the industry has already been busy examining, with the virtualization and cloud technologies actually addressing this subject. Huawei has now empowered it with three more concepts point:
1) Go beyond the CPU boundary: To unlock the computing potential and improve computing efficiency, there are more options than simply increasing the CPU quantity.
2) Go beyond the server boundary: To implement DC-level resource pooling and on-demand provisioning, improving resource utilization with it.
3) Go beyond the DC boundary: To carry out computing not only inside DCs, but to take computing to the edge or wherever more suitable, empowering everything with intelligence.
An integral element to Boundless Computing is Huawei's capabilities of innovating from the chip level, and based on that to further develop differentiated values and features. Currently, Huawei leverages its innovations with computing, storage, networking, and management chips for servers to improve computing efficiency for the industries to evolve towards holistic management of intelligence.
Can you outline to us what your primary objectives and goals are for the rest of 2018?
Huawei’s Vision and Mission is to “bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world.” We will continue to focus on the distribution, presentation, transmission, processing, and storage of information by providing innovative end-to-end ICT solutions and products for three customer groups: carriers, enterprises, and consumers. In the era of ICT convergence, our customer-oriented organizational architecture enables us to achieve synergies in product innovation, and to deliver differentiated services to different customer groups based on their unique characteristics.
