Huawei’s cloud services launch, first hinted at last year at Huawei Connect in Shanghai and subsequently confirmed at Africacom earlier this year, is imminent, with it set for launch in March. Today, the company elaborated a bit more on its plans, revealing that it is currently working with South African partners for the construction of the data centres in Johannesburg initially, with deployment in Cape Town to follow.

To start with, Huawei elaborated that it will deploy its localised public cloud services based on local industry policies, customer requirements and partner conditions.

Speaking at a Cloud Summit in Johannesburg, Huawei outlined its plans for a fully connected Africa driven by Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. “If Cloud 1.0 is an era driven by infrastructure resources, then Cloud 2.0 is the era of cloud-native applications, driven by data and AI platforms,” said Huawei Cloud’s senior manager for IT transformation, Farouk Osman Latib.

Latib went on to emphasise the importance of the combination of cloud and AI: “If we compare an enterprise to an aircraft, technologies like AI, IoT and 5G can be regarded as engines, but Cloud is like a runway for the aircraft to take off towards digitisation.”

According to the company, industry is changing in the Cloud 2.0 era, with existing IT systems at medium-to-large sized enterprises are moving towards hybrid cloud architectures. Internet applications and other new technologies like cloud computing, AI, and loT are all growing at rapid pace.

“In the Cloud 2.0 era, infrastructure must meet the rapid development of big data so that hundreds of industries, can garner more dividends from data. The physicality of industry is integrating with IT in deeper ways to improve productivity and socioeconomic benefit,” added Latib.

 “With cloud and AI, we aim to provide enterprises, small and large, with one-stop AI platform services, enriching fine-grained APIs, adapting rich algorithms in diverse industry sectors and heterogeneous computing infrastructure so that everyone can use various artificial intelligence algorithms to solve practical problems,” he continued.

Huawei’s anticipated cloud services launch in March, will, the company asserted, make it “the world's first cloud service provider with an operational data centre in Africa.” This will not be competing alone however, with Amazon having its own plans and Microsoft’s data centers still to come online.

In the meantime, Huawei’s cloud service will be available to organisations in South Africa and neighboring countries, providing, according to Huawei, lower-latency as well as reliable and secure cloud services. Huawei says the service will be ready for trial use from next week based on the local data centre.

The latest cloud launch locally will join Huawei’s already considerable global footprint – more than 160 cloud services in 18 categories with over 60 general-purpose solutions (such as SAP, HPC, IoT, security and DevOps). Huawei has also developed over 80 industry-specific scenarios, such as manufacturing, e-commerce, gaming, finance, and IoV.