The annual Huawei Eco Connect event took place today at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, and brought together business leaders, global industry visionaries, opinion leaders, partners and potential partners for an in-depth update on what Huawei Enterprise has to offer within the South African market in 2019. The event saw more than a 1000 attendees and housed incredible exhibition stands from an array of partners including Altron, Mustek, Pinnacle, EOH, BCX, Gijima, TorqueIT, Commvault, Trillcom, Xon, Datacentrix, Tech Mahindra, and Reflex.

At a media briefing held during the event, Huawei Enterprise Managing Director Alex Du Min confirmed that; “Huawei Enterprise South Africa’s strategy for 2019 will centre around collaboration with partners and customers in order to develop innovative and leading industry specific solutions that will enable flexible, open, and secure platforms to drive enterprise digital transformation”.

Huawei is focused on facilitating a digital transformation ecosystem within South Africa in order to implement joint innovations and expand this ecosystem in terms of industry alliances, business alliances, developer platforms, and open-source communities. “The idea is that Huawei will provide the Data Centre facility, hardware and software infrastructure and technical team whilst the partner contributes with ideas, products and human resources”. By working together, “Huawei Enterprise can enable new ideas to be cultivated at a much faster pace and can allow for more agile industry innovation with a more efficient proof of concepts creation,” continued Mr Dun Min.

As Huawei Enterprise’s commitment to this strategy in 2019, it hopes to accelerate digitalisation, as well as to escalate the convergence of physical and digital worlds. New ICT represents, not only new technologies and platforms, but also a new ecosystem, making it a cornerstone of industrial digitalisation.

As digital transformation now dominates many C-suite and boardroom agendas, at the beginning phase of this 4th industrial revolution in Southern Africa, businesses are faced with radical viewpoints and demands of which CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs struggle to define cohesive digital strategies. “It is therefore crucial that Huawei Enterprise commits to building a sustainable platform within which all its partners can thrive,” said Mr Du Min.

In line with the Huawei Enterprise Platform + Ecosystem strategy, Huawei Enterprise will in 2019 specifically focus on the 4 star products and solutions namely:

• Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, which is a high-end product for the enterprise business market, offering both reliability and high performance.
• Huawei Wi-Fi 6 AP which is the industry's first application of 8x8 MU-MIMO, OFDMA, and 1024 QAM. It is also the industry's first wireless AP with a data transfer speed of up to 10Gbps. According to one of Huawei’s distribution partners Pinnacle CEO Tim Humphreys Davies; “It is great to see a 1gig uplink for any wireless device and high density of single users per point – which is great for streaming. This will drive better content and a richer experience.”
• The industry's first data center switch built for the AI era – the CloudEngine 16800. With an embedded AI chip, the CloudEngine 16800 uses the innovative iLossless algorithm to achieve an AI computing power of 100%, improving data storage IOPS by 30%.
• Huawei’s software-defined cameras that can be applied in a wide variety of security scenarios such as face checkpoint, situation awareness, vehicle checkpoint, and Intelligent Transportation Surveillance (ITS). The software-defined camera supports continuous evolution and development of algorithms and applications. The open-ended platform enables AI to be applied in more security scenarios.

Enterprise Managing Director Mr. Alex Du Min also thanked partners for their ongoing commitment to Huawei’s vision and stressed the importance of relationship building. “Huawei Enterprise will continue to strengthen relationships with our partners in South Africa and fiercely support and enable them to achieve the best results for their businesses by equipping them with the latest technological advancements in this market.”