Huawei's premier annual event for the global ICT industry – HUAWEI CONNECT 2021 – kicked off yesterday, September 23rd. The rotating president of Huawei, Eric Xu, opened the event with a speech titled “Innovating Nonstop for Faster Digitalization”.
This year's event, with the theme “Dive into the digital“explors 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 success shared. The event is scheduled to have four keynotes, five summits and 66 sessions, with more than 200 speakers including industry visionaries, business leaders, technology experts and ecosystem partners. It will be broadcast live in 11 languages on Huawei's corporate website and its media partners. The event will also feature online exhibitions, remote visits to exhibition rooms and open discussion panels, allowing for online interaction and counter experiences.
Huawei rotating president Eric Xu delivers a keynote address at HUAWEI CONNECT 2021
In his presentation, 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 to a fully connected and intelligent world.
Xu said: “Digital development depends on digital technology. For digital technology to remain relevant, we must continue to innovate and create value. Cloud, AI and networking are three critical digital technologies.” Xu then shared some of the progress Huawei has made in these three areas, what Huawei is doing to enable low-carbon development and where the industry as a whole is heading.
Xu explained that HUAWEI CLOUD, the company's cloud service 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 has also provided more than 4.500 services on the HUAWEI CLOUD Marketplace . It has become an important platform for Internet companies, businesses and governments to make their organizations digital.
At the event, Xu launched the industry's first native distributed cloud service, called UCS – a ubiquitous native cloud service available on the HUAWEI CLOUD. With UCS, Huawei plans to provide enterprises with a consistent experience when using native cloud applications that are not limited by geographic, cross-cloud or traffic limitations, thereby accelerating digital transformation across all industries.
Huawei's full AI portfolio across all scenarios, launched in 2018, is also progressing as expected. Its MindSpore framework has become the leading AI computing framework in China. Meanwhile, the Atlas 900 cluster, as well as cloud services based on it, currently serve more than 300 companies, supporting the training of many models including the large HUAWEI CLOUD Pangu models. HUAWEI CLOUD ModelArts has made AI application development incredibly simple with its complete scenario-based services. The ultimate goal of ModelArts is to allow each engineer to independently develop their own Artificial Intelligence applications.
Xu also introduced Huawei's innovations in the field of networking. As organizations go digital, they tend to see exponential growth in network complexity. To solve this, Huawei has been innovating solutions for global networks based on the concept of autonomous driving (ADN) network. The company has worked with clients in the finance, education and healthcare industries to innovate and deploy new applications and build networks that are self-fulfilling, self-healing, self-optimized and autonomous.
Xu went on to explain how Huawei is using digital technology to support low-carbon development as part of global efforts to reach peak CO2 emissions and carbon neutrality. Specifically, Huawei focuses on three main initiatives:
- Invest and innovate in energy saving technologies to provide more energy efficient ICT products for a low carbon ICT industry;
- Invest in innovations where power electronics and digital technologies converge to promote clean energy and the digitization of traditional energy; and
- (Providing digital technology to help all sectors go digital and low-carbon.
Zhang Ping'an, CEO of Cloud BU and President of Huawei Consumer Cloud Service, spoke about HUAWEI CLOUD's strategic initiatives and launched new services and products at the event. “The key to a successful digital transformation is thinking cloud native and acting cloud native,” Zhang said. “HUAWEI CLOUD joins our customers and partners to immerse themselves in the 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.” Zhang announced two new regions in Mexico and Ulanqab in China, and launched 10 new HUAWEI CLOUD services. The announcement included MacroVerse – HUAWEI CLOUD aPaaS, OptVerse AI Solver, HUAWEI CLOUD Stack 8.1, SparkRTC – a real-time audio and video service, and Pangu, a great model for drug molecules.
Customers and partners in attendance included Christophe Ozer, head of Orange Cloud (Orange Flexible Engine) APAC; Wu Qiang, vice president of Tianjin Port Holdings; Chen Haining, General Manager of IT Department at Shanghai Pudong Development Bank; and Jiang Chuanrong, President of Shanghai Mirror Pictures. They described their joint innovation experience with Huawei in their digital transformation. Wu Qiang said: “Tianjin port is one of the top 10 ports in the world, with an annual capacity of nearly 20 million containers. HUAWEI CLOUD OptVerse AI Solver helps us improve our planning speed by more than 100 times based on tens of millions of variables and constraints, maximize resource scheduling, and boost operation efficiency. "
Xu concluded his speech with: “Continuous innovation has been the driving force behind digitization until now. Moving forward, if we hope to achieve more ambitious goals for digitization, continuous innovation will remain the key. So let's innovate non-stop for a better future. "
Huawei hosts HUAWEI CONNECT 2021 online from September 23rd to October 31st. The theme of this year's event is Dive into Digital. We'll delve into the practical application of technologies like cloud, IA and 5G across all industries and how they can make organizations of all shapes and sizes more efficient, versatile and ultimately more resilient as we move into the economy recovery.
For more information, https://www.huawei.com/en/events/huaweiconnect
