Huawei launches $1bn cloud investment strategy
Mon 19 Oct 2015
Chinese multinational Huawei has today confirmed that it will funnel $1bn (approx. £650mn) into its cloud computing services over the next five years.
The company suggested that the new investment would make its wider cloud offerings more attractive to its existing clients. Firms already using Huawei infrastructure would be able to access software to help them develop apps and receive training and technical support including data analytics and security.
Tech companies in the region are pushing investment into the cloud market – with spending in the sector set to reach $20bn by 2020, from $1.5bn in 2013. In September, Chinese gaming and social media giant Tencent announced that it would be investing over 10bn yuan (approx. £1bn) in its cloud business and data centre portfolio over the next five years.
Earlier this summer, online shopping expert Alibaba said that it will be investing $1bn in cloud computing opportunities. This push included a big data artificial intelligence (AI) platform to allow developers to better predict user behaviour.
According to Huawei, which does not reveal its cloud-based revenue, the business area is still only a small part of its overall earnings. However, it predicts a major source of growth in the sector which it hopes to take advantage of. Last year, the company said that it was hoping to increase its cloud revenue to $10bn in five years, from $1bn in 2013. Huawei’s total revenue in 2014 was $46.5bn.
The company currently maintains 660 data centres worldwide, 255 of which are cloud data centres. It is a supporter of the OpenStack community, and became one of the first contributors to Kilo, offering resolved bug data and reviews on architecture innovation. It is also a founding member of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which seek to promote container-packaged and dynamically managed systems architecture.
