When steering a large-scale enterprise through the digital transformation process, an organization faces a unique set of challenges and potential risks. It’s helpful to explore the question of why digital transformation is especially challenging for large companies, what are the core requirements and challenges of industry pioneers? What makes digital transformation a possibility?
Mobile World Congress 2019 — Setting the Stage for the Enterprise Transformation
At the event, Huawei Enterprise demonstrated its flagship products for the enterprise market in three exhibition areas: Digital Platform, Ubiquitous Connectivity, and Pervasive Intelligence. Huawei Enterprise also hosted the Digital Transformation of Industries Summit on February 25 at Mobile World Congress 2019. The Summit gathered global logistics, rail, finance, aviation, and smart city customers to explore best practices in their digital transformation journeys.
Digital Platform: Building the Foundation of the Digital World with a Thriving Ecosystem
During his presentation at the Summit, Yan Lida, President of Huawei Enterprise Business Group, said: “In this era, the digital transformation of enterprises, the economy, and the whole society has brought enormous opportunities and challenges to various industries. Huawei deems that digitalization can be achieved only when the digital world and the physical world are fully integrated. Based on this understanding and its more than ten years of digital transformation experience, Huawei launched the Digital Platform for the enterprise market in response to customer needs. It is the only platform that can horizontally integrate new ICT including cloud, AI, IoT, Big Data, converged communication, video, and GIS, as well as vertically connect devices, edge, network, and cloud. It is integrated, intelligent and inheritable.”
Yan also quoted an example of how digital platform powers its smart campus offering. In response to Huawei’s own business complexity, globalization challenges, and complicated system, its digital transformation encounters lots of challenges like tremendous old existing systems, silo applications and lack of ability to real-time monitoring the status of its business.
Campuses play an important role in people’s work and life in Huawei. By leveraging ICT technologies, such as cloud computing, the IoT, big data, and artificial intelligence, Huawei’s Smart Campus addresses challenges to traditional campuses, such as low management efficiency, poor service experience, serious energy waste, weak comprehensive security, and high operational costs. It implements digital transformation of industries’ campuses, fuels innovative industry development, and enhances service experience.
According to Yan, Huawei’s Digital Platform redefines the campus service architecture. This platform is compatible with various terminals and supports diverse applications to integrate data, visualize the campus status, manage all services, and control events. By constructing secure, comfortable, efficient, green, and smart campuses, the solution provides better service experiences for campus users and operational excellence for campus operators, thereby unleashing more business and social benefits.
Yan Lida, President, Huawei Enterprise Business, MWC 2019
Creating a Synergy to Enable Agile Innovation
With cloud as its foundation, the Digital Platform enables organizations to achieve business synergy and agile innovation by optimizing the integration of new ICT and converged data, building the foundation of the digital world. The company’s platform supports enterprises across industries to create digital business blueprints to compete in an intelligent era.
Teaming up with Digital Transformation Pioneers
Huawei also invited customers and partners from multiple industries to share their digital transformation best practices during the Summit.
- Smart City: Huawei and Sardinia in Italy are using the Digital Platform to empower smart city development.
- Finance: Huawei and DBS Bank are accelerating the digital transformation of the financial services industry by leveraging intelligence and data capabilities.
- Logistics: DHL and Huawei jointly developed the innovative, multi-scenario Smart Logistics Solution based on Huawei’s IoT technologies, to improve logistics efficiency, as well as promote and realize the transformation of the entire logistics process.
- Aviation: Huawei and Turkish Airlines are making aviation smarter with connectivity.
- Rail: Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) is strengthening its cooperation with Huawei, offering higher quality, more efficient and continuously improving services based on Huawei’s connectivity technologies, leading railway development in Europe.
Innovating to Meet the Needs of Digital Transformation
Ubiquitous Connectivity
Going digital is an evolutionary leap that requires new initiatives. The success or failure of digital initiatives can often hinge on the network — particularly Wi-Fi, as it is the first point of connectivity for Internet of Things (IoT) devices and other devices.
Over the next few years, technologies such as 4K/8K Ultra HD Video, IoT, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and automatic guided vehicle (AGV) will be widely used in education, enterprise, and industrial automation. These innovative technologies require ongoing connectivity in terms of bandwidth, latency, connection quality, transmission efficiency, and terminal power consumption management.
Based on this, Huawei released a Wi-Fi 6 forecast white paper to define new standards for high-quality enterprise Wi-Fi at MWC 2019. Based on standards, chips, terminals, devices, and applications, this report offers an objective judgment on the high-scale commercial use of Wi-Fi 6. The report also combines the opinions of industry standards organizations and industry analysts to conclude that 2019 will be the year of Wi-Fi 6, and that Wi-Fi 6 will have been deployed by 90% of enterprises by 2023. In short, Wi-Fi will be the basic network technology that supports enterprise production and service digitalization.
Wi-Fi 6, Huawei
Pervasive Intelligence
Other than the AI capabilities of each product, including AI computing, Ascend series AI processors and mainstream heterogeneous computing components, Huawei also demonstrated its new OceanStor Dorado3000 V3 entry-level all-flash storage system and the OceanStor Dorado Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) mid-range and high-end all-flash storage. The company asserts NVMe enables faster communication between solid-state drives (SSDs) and host systems, providing sharp latency decreases to bring quality data services to customers and applications — the OceanStor Dorado mid-range and high-end all-flash storage achieve a .3 millisecond latency. Huawei says the storage systems meet the demands of database, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), virtual server infrastructure (VSI), and other scenarios, facilitating data centers of customers in finance, manufacturing, and telecommunications sectors to step into the all-flash era.
Mobile World Congress More than Phones
Today’s businesses are driven by technology and innovation. In order to thrive, enterprises must embrace a digital platform with leading connectivity and intelligence that responds to the constantly evolving technological advances and embraces disruptive advancements, while remaining agile throughout to enable adjustments.
Every year, the highlight of Mobile World Congress is filled with major announcements in the smartphone space. While Huawei did make a big splash with its 5G foldable phone, the tech company came to Barcelona to prove that Huawei is more than in 5G and smartphones, but also the leaders in connectivity and intelligence in enterprise digital transformation.