Jay Zhou, Managing Director, Huawei Cloud South Africa

By developing operational excellence and customer success capabilities, Huawei Cloud and its partners are better equipped to help clients move to, manage, and effectively leverage the cloud. 

Huawei’s Managing Director for Cloud SA, Jay Zhou, spoke about this during the recent Huawei Eco-Connect Day. He remarked on the year-on-year growth driven by an increasing number of companies moving to the cloud. This trend supports Huawei’s mission to deliver ‘a cloud for everyone’.

“Huawei has consistently invested heavily in supporting technology innovation. With $120 billion invested in R&D over the past decade and an equal amount expected over the next five years, we continue to lead our competitors in innovation,” he says. 

Zhou also mentioned that Huawei Cloud SA is the fastest-growing cloud offering in the country. This growth is testament to Huawei Cloud’s value propositions, including a complete solution offering and 24/7 local support and service. Huawei Cloud recently ranked number 3 in SA for IaaS, according to Gartner.

Zhou said this year’s goal is to keep earning trust from local partners and customers while continuously innovating. These innovations will impact critical sectors, including media, fintech, education, public sector, and e-commerce.

“In the government sector, we foresee a hybrid cloud future to address data privacy concerns. Huawei is uniquely positioned to offer hybrid cloud services combining traditional and cloud computing benefits,” Zhou said.

For education, Zhou emphasized online education, stating that Huawei has shown its capabilities by helping a record of 30,000 Unisa students to write their exams online.

Zhou also highlighted Huawei’s low latency live solution, used during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which significantly enhances content distribution and consumption in the media industry. 

For e-commerce and fintech, Huawei Cloud offers digital solutions like AI and analytics built into the platform and next-generation services, providing deep consumer insights and stability, scalability, and security.

Worth noting is Huawei’s AI Pangu Model, designed to reshape all industries and drive value creation. It’s the first AI prediction model to demonstrate higher precision than traditional weather forecast methods and was published by Nature magazine, which is one of the top science publications.

Despite Huawei’s modesty, the company maintains its position as an aggressive market challenger, backed by a strong value proposition. 

“Ultimately, our aim is to build a cloud for everyone – Corporate enterprises, SMEs and developers - that is affordable, trustworthy and constantly innovating,” Zhou concluded.