Steven Chen, MD, Huawei Cloud South Africa

South Africa is currently viewed as the largest cloud market on the continent, despite the fact that uptake across the various industries is not as massive as it could be. Nonetheless, Huawei Cloud strongly believes in the huge potential of the local market, as the company sees rising demand for cloud services across both the public and private sectors. In fact, South Africa has one of the fastest cloud growth rates in both Africa and across the rest of the world, according to Huawei Cloud South Africa’s new managing director, Steven Chen.

Chen brings more than 15 years of global market development experience to the role, gained within the Southern African, Northern African, Middle Eastern and Chinese markets, with his key focus being on digital transformation and global cloud innovation and sales.

Furthermore, he has led and managed a significant number of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) projects across global accounts and has spent the last five years in South Africa, working closely with a variety of partners and customers from both the public and private sectors.

Bringing leadership, passion and dedication to the process of business development, he has established himself as a trusted advisor and partner to multiple organisations that seek to thrive in the digital age.

Chen says Huawei recognises that cloud technologies are penetrating into South African industries across the board. As this technology has been adopted by these different industries, its acceptance has grown exponentially.

“While our team is working with numerous industries and assisting them all to grow, our key focus at present - and the particular areas where we have witnessed exceptional growth - are e-commerce and retail, media and entertainment and business and government. Our SA cloud team is able to leverage their accumulated knowledge and experience to help facilitate the customers’ evolution throughout the intricacies of the digital transformation journey,” he states.

“Customers are also now realising the enormous benefits associated with the cloud, including improved business continuity, significant cost savings, a reduction in downtime, and improved disaster recovery - not to mention better security.”

Another differentiator Huawei Cloud brings to the table is that the organisation has local technical teams and solution architects on the ground in South Africa, enabling it to provide real-time support to clients. This is key, he adds, as not only are there relevant in-country skills that are immediately available, but these can further be supplemented by Huawei’s global resources.

“Huawei Cloud also prides itself on helping customers to overcome any challenges they face by working closely together. It is imperative to listen carefully to our customers’ requirements and pain points, and then to design solutions that meets the specific requirements they demand.

“Let’s look at e-commerce, which is an environment where customers need to essentially monetise their data, and leverage it to improve service and boost customer relations. Collaborating with us affords clients additional benefits such as access to Huawei’s AI technologies, enabling them to restructure the way they do things - from the supply chain side, all the way through marketing and operations and on to customer management - to create extra value for their clients.

A good example here is our ‘digital humans’ which are AI bots that can help our customers improve their operational efficiencies and boost their revenues. It is these kinds of solutions that give us the edge in helping our customers overcome the many challenges they face.”

Chen notes that in his new role, he will focus on ensuring that the Huawei Cloud SA team remains committed to providing solutions that are aligned with customer expectations. He adds that the company will continue to provide clients with free proof of concept (PoC) trials, to allow them to experience the service that it offers - along with the expertise Huawei brings to the table - and how these solutions help them improve business efficiencies.

“As one of the major cloud hyperscalers, we are well aware of, and view it in a serious light, the global and local shortage of relevant cloud skills. Thus, in order to help our customers develop their own knowledgeable and trained resources, Huawei also offers fully funded training and certifications, enabling them to upskill their staff in this manner.

“By helping to grow these skills within our customer base, we are able to benefit not only our partners, but the cloud market as a whole,” he says.

The company also understands the importance of the developer community to this market sector, which is why Huawei hosts an annual Developer Conference, to demonstrate its support for the full cloud ecosystem.

“For us, it’s all about transferring skills to local customers and partners, while also providing them with support to enable growth and to help them develop their business with access to the newest cloud-based solutions.

We anticipate rapid growth in this market moving forward, and aim to keep this rate of growth going.

“Huawei Cloud’s vision for South Africa is to grow our business exponentially and aggressively and we invite any organisation that is looking for a cloud provider to engage with us and find out how we differentiate ourselves. With our access to technical innovation, our comparatively low cost, and our access to both local and international skills, we believe we have an exceptional cloud offering that is strongly focused on growing local businesses,” he concludes.

Connect with HUAWEI CLOUD:

www.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/ Email: huaweicloudsa@huawei.com