Huawei Technologies, the leading networking solutions vendor from China, expects the enterprise division of the business to contribute 20% of overall revenues by 2015. According to David He, president of marketing for the enterprise business group, the enterprise division, which was officially launched by the company earlier this, is expected to grow by leaps and bounds in the next few years.
“We want to be the number one provider of end-to-end ICT solutions connected to the data centre and the network, especially in emerging markets like the Middle East, by 2015. And we want to do that by staying true to Huawei principles. We don’t want be to just another global provider, we want to be Huawei,” says He, with pride.
According to He, much of the growth that the firm is targeting in the enterprise segment will be enabled by expanding its current presence in countries around the world. It will capitalise on its current telecom-focused sales establishment in 140 countries, build enterprise teams, and also create and enable a channel partner base in order to reach more potential customers in the public and private sectors.
“In the enterprise segment, we see a lot of interest from varied verticals, like education and healthcare. This is especially true for developed markets like North America and Europe. In developing markets, we see a lot more ICT investment being made by public sector and government bodies. In tune with that, we see more potential interest in our enterprise solutions coming from that particular sector in these markets. This is true for the Middle East region as well,” says He.
The company prides itself on its strong R&D base. More than 50,000 of its 120,000 staff strength is focused on R&D and it re-invests 10% of global revenues back into product development every year. According to He, the R&D process is driven by constant feedback from customers across the global in a system that is referred to internally as integrated product development.
“In this system, we translate the market terms of the customer into technical language, and keep the customer informed about when they can expect the launch of the product with the relevant updates. While this is an extremely mature process for our telecoms arm, the process will work slightly differently for the enterprise business. With the new division, we expect to collect fresh feedback from our customers directly, but we also expect our global and local partners to help us in not only collecting these thoughts from customers but to help us integrate this into future versions of products as well,” says He.
As the company finalises on its acquisition of Symantec’s stake in the Huawei-Symantec joint venture, He assures that there will be more security and storage-oriented solutions coming out of that side of the business next year.
“We already have products from the joint venture which are functioning as integrated elements with our current solution sets, including in our cloud solution. We will continue to innovate in that area and launch more solution sets meant for enterprises in the coming months,” added He.
Sathya Mithra Ashok is reporting live from the Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, China.
