Huawei Enterprise Business Group (EBG) is one of Huawei's three major business units. Last week, Huawei launched its corporate vision to “bring digital to every person, home and organisation for a fully connected, intelligent world at the 15th Huawei Global Analyst Summit (HAS2018) in Shenzhen. Speaking at a media roundtable, Qiu Heng, Huawei’s EBG President of Global Marketing/Chief Marketing Officer, said that EBG embodies the “organisation” part of that vision, providing efficient ICT solutions and services to organisations around the world while actively promoting the ICT transformation of the enterprise market.

While it is the smallest of Huawei’s main business units, Qiu mentioned that it has also seen tremendous growth since it was launched in 2011 and has consistently doubled its revenue every couple of years, serving leading companies in the Global Fortune 500. It is gaining leading local and worldwide market shares for many of its products and solutions such as optical transmission, storage, IoT, SD-WAN, edge computing and big data solutions. The company expects EBG’s sales revenue to exceed 10 billion USD in 2018. In terms of long term intensive investment, Qiu also highlighted the fact that Huawei is ranked sixth in the world, ahead of global IT brands such as HP, Cisco, Dell EMC and Amazon.

Besides the commitment to R&D, Qiu said the company’s capabilities to make its own chipsets, combined with good algorithm and architecture designs, which have brought it success in the past, is now contributing to EBG’s growth and portfolio of leading products in the enterprise business. Understanding the industry is also key. “Since we’re doing business with enterprises, we need to understand the industry. We have already received recognition from different industries, including the government sector, finance sector, energy, manufacturing, transportation, education, etc. That has not only increased our revenue, and also increased our understanding of the business,” Qiu explained.

Qiu went on to say that making good products isn’t their only mission. They’re also building a digital platform to converge the physical and digital world for industries embarking on a digital transformation. Over the years, Huawei has helped to implement digital change in a number of industries around the world. In the carrier industry, Telecom Italia replaced legacy storage systems with Huawei all-flash arrays. Delivering the same capacity, the number of required cabinets was reduced from 55 to 9, the electricity fee was cut by 82%, the space usage was reduced by 82%, and the number of maintenance personnel was reduced by 50%. The storage performance was also improved by 55%, and the overall OPEX reduced by 73%.

Meanwhile in the financial industry, China Everbright Bank chose Huawei's hyper-converged infrastructure to implement digital transformation in its 38 branches. On average, the implementation took two days to put in a branch. The number of servers and cabinets required was reduced by 86% and the number of maintenance engineers decreased by 45%.

As Qiu saw it, EBG is in a vast market space, one that for now at least, only the sky seems to be the limit. The total global investment in digital transformation is growing every year and will reach USD 2 trillion by 2020, according to IDC. “Every industry is embarking on a digital transformation. Some industries are already ongoing with the transformation, while others are still on the way. But every industry will sooner or later do digital transformation,” he said. He elaborated that Huawei EBG’s ICT revenue will come from two parts, firstly from the conventional products and solutions, and secondly from the newer technologies such as IoT, big data, cloud and AI, that are becoming an increasingly important part of Huawei’s business strategy and vision.

“It’s not that we’re trying to change the game. The game itself has changed. In the past, when we talk about ICT, it’s just about computers, LAN switches and IT systems. But now when we talk about ICT, it’s about production systems. It’s now the digital transformation era and digital transformation itself is the strategy of the company. The whole business decision level-scale and the way to play the game are changing. So, we just follow the change,” he said when asked whether Huawei was trying to be a game changer in the ICT industry.

Qiu concluded the media briefing with the following thought, “In order to succeed, survive and thrive in the long term, you need to make big plans. That’s why we’re trying to make our products the best, we’re trying to build a digital platform and support our customers’ digital transformation in the long run. And we’re trying to understand different industries. If you can’t understand the industry, you can’t do long term business. So, we are making a plan to survive for long term and digital transformation is a huge market. It gives us space to grow, grow and grow.”