Industry Thought Leadership

Building an Open and Diverse Ecosystem for Shared Success in the Middle East

September, 2017
Charles Yang
President

Huawei Middle East

The integration of IT and telecommunications is creating a wave of innovative new technologies that are revolutionizing organizations across all sectors and fueling the digital transformation. At Huawei, we aim to be an enabler of technological progress worldwide. We believe that the key to successful digitalization is to have a community of collaborative partners bringing together their unique strengths to develop products and solutions that meet the needs of customers.

As the digital transformation sweeps across the Middle East, it is vital for organizations in the region to have the necessary infrastructure to successfully navigate the road to digitalization or risk being left behind. This is why we strive to act as the sun and soil to nurture a diverse and thriving ecosystem of partners and vendors in the Middle East.

On the developer side, Huawei wants to build an environment where all our partners can contribute to technological progress and succeed together. We are collaborating with local industry leaders, taking advantage of their expertise to build products and solutions with distinct differentiated advantages.

To further this aim, Huawei has established 13 OpenLabs worldwide over the last year to act as the bridge between vendors and customers. OpenLabs enable vendors and partners to work together to tailor solutions in order to precisely target their industry needs.

In May 2017, we opened the first OpenLab in the Middle East in Dubai. This is yet another example of Huawei’s desire to foster a community of shared success in the region. OpenLab Dubai provides our regional partners with a platform to test and customize a variety of technologies ranging from Cloud Computing to Big Data Analytics to eLTE and Converged Communications. We have designed the OpenLab to target the vertical sectors most relevant to the Middle East, particularly Public Safety, Smart Cities, Transportation, Education and Oil & Gas.

A fast, secure and agile cloud is a prerequisite for digitalization, and an all-cloud strategy is a key element of regional digital transformation. Huawei focuses on unifying standards for scheduling management of the All-Cloud systems. One of the ways we do this is by contributing more manpower and open source code to establish unified standards to promote improved scheduling and management of the All-Cloud system.

Across the globe, our commitment to contributing to the ICT ecosystem is demonstrated by our leadership positions and activities in a number of international alliances:

  • Huawei serves as a co-chairman of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and has had 240 proposals accepted, the highest number of any member.
  • As a founding and platinum VIP member of the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), Huawei occupies key seats, such as secretary general of the Board of Directors, and has initiated 12 community projects, the highest number of any member.
  • Huawei is a platinum director of the OpenStack open source community and has been an exceptional contributor to the community, particularly in the aspects of service reliability, security, and system maintainability.
  • We are also a Platinum member in the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) which aims to establish unified standards for scheduling & management of all-cloud systems.

By combining Huawei’s global expertise with partners’ local insight through the OpenLab platform, we can create an ecosystem of symbiotic relationships and foster an atmosphere of openness and collaboration in the Middle East. This brings us closer to achieving our goal of Building A Better Connected World.