“Huawei Cloud’s Everything as a Service Model will Power all Industry Domains in Nepal”, says Ivan Mo

Huawei Technologies Co. Limited’s newly established business group, Huawei Cloud aims to become Asia’s top cloud service provider in the next three years. Established in 1987 in China, Huawei Technologies has been a big name in the telco equipment and consumer smartphone sector. Recently, the Chinese tech giant has been prioritizing Cloud Computing Business to move forward.

Since its inception in 2017, Huawei Cloud has been continuously launching new cloud services for various industries across the world. They are working to reach every potential industry in Nepal directly and through their HCPN (Huawei Cloud Partner Network).

TekhLekh spoke to Ivan Mo, Public Relations Director for Huawei and Head of Huawei Cloud in Nepal.

Mo, who has been in Nepal for three years shares opportunities for Huawei Cloud, Nepal market’s potential for cloud adoption and Huawei’s plans to cultivate Cloud talents in Nepal.

Excerpts:

TL: How is Huawei Cloud gaining traction in the cloud market? Could you share with us about a few of your global and local clients?

Huawei Cloud has attracted 2.3 million developers, 14,000 consultants, 6,000 technical partners and 4,500 marketplace products.

According to the report of Gartner, a Research and Consultant Company, published in June 2021, Huawei Cloud has secured second place with over 16 percent of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in China. Similarly, the report says that Huawei Cloud is the top five players in IaaS in the global scene.

Huawei Cloud has become an important platform for various companies in sectors including IT, Software, Gaming, Conglomerate, Carrier, Logistics, Transportation, Education, Healthcare, Governments and others.

Some of the clients of Huawei Cloud include Sunway Smart City – a fully integrated smart, sustainable township in Malaysia, Aladdin – a Singapore-based eCommerce enabler, GetRide – a ride-hailing platform in Myanmar, Hexafood – a spice Production Company in Malaysia among others.

Huawei Cloud provides full-stack solutions for microservice, web, mobile and function applications, end-to-end solutions comprising basic and advanced services that help enterprises rapidly roll out eCommerce platforms and manage resources. It helps in setting up an online concept store and establishing an IOI team to apply big data in intelligent manufacturing and production. Huawei Cloud also provides customized services of Virtual Private Cloud and Elastic Cloud Server. In Nepal, we have been working with industries including commercial banks, airlines, and media and so on.

TL: How is it standing out in the market compared to other big players including Alibaba, AWS, Microsoft Azure and others?

Huawei Cloud provides typical Cloud Services as other players in the market. Data Storage, Computing, Data Processing, Internet Connectivity, AI, Internet of Things are provided by other Cloud Service companies as well. However, we have had the advantage of working in a business-to-business model since the beginning. Unlike other players from the background of eCommerce, or the Business-to-Consumer model, we have focused on enterprises from the beginning.

We have been working with vertical industries like Banking, Financial and Insurance services, the manufacturing sector and digital-native brands for several years. And we understand their IT requirements.

Besides this, another advantage of working with Huawei Cloud is that we provide our clients with SaaS through our ecosystem partners. If you see the marketplace of Huawei cloud, we have a lot of third-party ecosystem partners. Our new clients can then use their SAAS products or solution built on Huawei cloud for their own advantage.

Recently we have also launched HUAWEI CLOUD UCS during Huawei Cloud Connect 2021. This Ubiquitous Cloud-Native Service is the industry’s first distributed cloud-native product. With this, two new regions for Huawei Cloud were launched. The services include MacroVerse aPaaS, OptVerse AI Solver, Huawei Cloud Stack 8.1, Pangu drug molecule model, and SparkRTC.

Huawei Cloud is developing more experts and is continuing to invest significantly in R&D, which will help us gain more insights and work accordingly in the future.

TL: What kind of opportunities does Huawei Cloud see in the Nepali market? 

Huawei has been here for the last 21 years and we are the oldest international telecom player in Nepal. We have already created 10,000 plus direct and indirect jobs in Nepal. None of the major international cloud service providers have the direct local presence and support as we have. We understand the Nepal market and can serve the market well.

One of the plans of Huawei Cloud is to develop tech talents. Nepal has a huge opportunity in this area. Young people here are competent in foreign languages, have the necessary IT expertise and other high-demand skills. They can pick up the cloud skills quickly and this will contribute to the area of talent management.

Huawei will collaborate with stakeholders including the private sector, government institutions and non-governmental organizations to train students and IT professionals. The company’s goal is to cultivate around 10,000 ICT talents in the next five years including cloud talents.

Enterprise-wise, there are a lot of digital-native companies and IT companies serving Nepal and abroad. The number of tech-enabled companies is growing every year, and businesses are rapidly adapting to digitization.

Similarly, many BFIs are bringing various digital products for loans, payments and deposits. These financial institutions need agile technology to keep themselves competitive. Likewise, trading is one of the main businesses in Nepal, and it is also gradually moving towards digitization.

Apart from this, many small businesses here are operating traditionally. They need to manage inventory, sales and maintain customer relationships, and accounts. Digital transformation will help them to keep up with emerging customer demands and keep themselves updated. Cloud services will be the best technology for them to embrace this oncoming digital transformation. We believe that Huawei Cloud’s Everything as a service model will power all industry domains in Nepal.

TL: How do you see growth in the upcoming years?

The growth potential is immense as all big and small ventures in Nepal are gradually moving towards digitization.

We are partnering with different ecosystem partners globally who are good at building IT systems for companies, consultation, or high-level infrastructure design.

Our partners understand Huawei Cloud, emphasize the importance of data-driven decision making and the use of cloud in this process to their end-users. We are following the same strategy in Nepal.

We are collaborating with partners to analyze the requirements and demands of the Nepal market. Based on their observation and study, we are designing solutions to match the Nepal market and serve the end-users in the best way possible.

Data and digitally-driven decision-making is the future for business and policy. So, there are ample areas to be explored in terms of opportunity.

TL: Huawei Cloud is planning to aim for Asia’s top cloud service provider in the next three years. Could you share with us some of the focus areas and a general strategy of Huawei Cloud. And where do the company find opportunities in Nepal? 

We are focusing on three domains, Digital Native companies, Banks and Financial Institutions and IT systems and we are working towards this direction in Nepal.

Nepal market has still not embraced digitization and it is said that this is a difficult task. But this is where the opportunity lies.

Besides this, Nepali Engineers and IT Engineers are quick learners. There are already a lot of digital-native companies in Nepal. These two factors will be a reason for the quick adoption of the cloud in Nepal.

TL: Has Covid 19 affected Cloud and AI business negatively or positively? Could you brief us on how it has been impacted?

Covid has given us a new norm of living. Around two years with Covid has changed the way how we work, learn, shop and communicate.

It has created a positive impact on the cloud and AI businesses.

Huawei Cloud along with Huazhong University of Science & Technology and Lanwon Technology launched an AI-assisted quantitative medical image analysis service for COVID-19. This technology can automatically, quickly, and correctly output CT quantification results to imaging and clinical doctors. This helps to replace the PCR method which usually takes a longer time. The company partnered with hospitals in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh to implement the technology.

Concerning Nepal, one of the leading banks in Nepal established its own learning management service through Huawei Cloud. With the growing need to hire more agents to sell their digital products, their HR department faced huge issues regarding making their employees understand the products. So, they designed this platform to share tutorials with their employees.

TL: Recently Huawei has announced to invest the US $ 100 million in the promotion of startups in the Asia Pacific region. What is Huawei Cloud’s plan regarding Nepal in this? 

 We have divided the project into different phases. In phase 1, we will focus on Singapore, HongKong, Malaysia and Thailand.

Similarly, the priority is on Philipines, Srilanka and Vietnam in the second phase.

We will be in Nepal in the third phase. The local team is working vigorously to promote Nepali startups. Hence we believe that we will reach Nepal two years from now.

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