Huawei’s annual flagship event for the global ICT industry – HUAWEI CONNECT 2021 – kicked off today. Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu opened the event with a keynote speech titled “Innovating Nonstop for Faster Digitalization”.
This year’s event, themed “Dive into Digital”, explores how digital technology can better integrate with business scenarios and industry know-how to address critical business challenges, and how stakeholders can work together more effectively to foster an open industry ecosystem and drive shared success.
In his keynote, Xu spoke about how helping industries go digital is a critical aspect of Huawei’s mission to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. He said, “Digital development relies on digital technology. For digital technology to stay relevant, we must continue to innovate and create value. Cloud, AI, and networks are three critical digital technologies.”
At the event, Xu launched the industry’s first distributed, cloud-native service called UCS – a ubiquitous cloud-native service available on HUAWEI CLOUD. With UCS, Huawei plans to provide enterprises with a consistent experience while using cloud-native applications that are not constrained by geographical, cross-cloud, or traffic limitations, thereby accelerating digital transformation in all industries.
HUAWEI CLOUD also announced two new regions, and ten new services including MacroVerse aPaaS, OptVerse AI Solver, HUAWEI CLOUD Stack 8.1, Pangu drug molecule model, and SparkRTC. It was also revealed that the first virtual human, Yunsheng, is set to join HUAWEI CLOUD.
Xu added that HUAWEI CLOUD, the company’s cloud service that was launched just four years ago, has already brought together more than 2.3 million developers, 14,000 consulting partners, and 6,000 technology partners, and also made more than 4,500 services available in the HUAWEI CLOUD Marketplace. It has become an important platform for Internet companies, enterprises, and governments alike to take their organizations digital. As of September 2021, HUAWEI CLOUD and partners operate 61 Availability Zones (AZs) in 27 geographic regions worldwide, covering more than 170 countries and regions.
Zhang Ping’an, CEO of HUAWEI CLOUD and President of Huawei Consumer Cloud Service, commented: “The key to successful digital transformation is to think cloud native and act cloud native. HUAWEI CLOUD joins our customers and partners to dive into digital and explore the potential of Everything as a Service – Infrastructure as a Service for global accessibility, Technology as a Service for flexible innovation, and Expertise as a Service for shared excellence.”
Huawei’s full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio released back in 2018 is also progressing as expected. Its MindSpore framework has become the mainstream AI computing framework in China. Meanwhile, the Atlas 900 cluster, as well as the cloud services based on it, currently serve more than 300 enterprises, supporting the training of many models, which include the HUAWEI CLOUD Pangu large models. HUAWEI CLOUD ModelArts has made AI application development incredibly simple with its full-pipeline, scenario-based services. The end goal of ModelArts is to enable each and every engineer to independently develop their own AI applications.
Xu also introduced Huawei’s innovations in the network domain. As organizations go digital, they tend to see exponential growth in network complexity. To tackle this, Huawei has been innovating solutions for global networks based on the concept of autonomous driving network (ADN). The company has been working with customers in the finance, education, and healthcare sectors to innovate and deploy new applications, and build networks that are self-fulfilling, self-healing, self-optimizing, and autonomous.
Xu went on to explain how Huawei is using digital technology to support low-carbon development, as part of global efforts to achieve peak CO2 emissions and carbon neutrality.
Huawei hosts HUAWEI CONNECT 2021 online from September 23 to October 31. The theme of this year’s event is Dive into Digital. The company will dive deep into the practical application of technologies like cloud, AI, and 5G in all industries, and how it can make organizations of all shapes and sizes more efficient, more versatile, and ultimately more resilient as we move towards economic recovery.