MUNICH – This week Munich was host to Huawei’s annual Innovation Day event, kicking off two days of packed topics for media, customers and partner attendees. This is the third year for this event and speakers included members of the Huawei executive team, customers, partners, industry experts and European government organizations.
Huawei’s William Xu, chief strategy marketing officer, kicked off the event by speaking on Huawei’s commitment to the European market, innovation research and the opportunity for the “Internet of Things.” Surprisingly, Huawei has been active in the European market for over 15 years. Maybe that isn’t surprising to our readers, but I did not realize the company has had a presence here for that long. Some of the most interesting statistics in support of the Huawei European presence are as follows:
- 19 joint innovation centers with European carriers such as Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom and Vodafone.
- Partnerships with automobile companies such as Audi to promote application development for the “Internet of vehicles.”
- MOU with Fraunhofer Gesellschaft to cooperate on Industry 4.0.
- Work with SAP to launch IoT and Industry 4.0 solutions for the transportation, oil and gas, and manufacturing sectors.
- 18 research and development facilities in eight European countries.
- Working with more than 700 partners in Europe, of which more than 120 are academic institutions.
Based on these examples, one would have to say that Huawei truly has a formidable presence in Europe.
Next up were speakers from Digital Europe and the Bavaria State Chancellory Office, who both talked about using technology as a competitive advantage within Europe and within Bavaria. That appears to be working as one statistic provided by the Financial Times related to “unicorns” in Europe vs. the U.S. in the last year showed 13 in the EU and 22 in the U.S. The gap might have been expected to be much larger. Another interesting statistic was related to the low number of enterprises that currently utilize technology to the fullest extent. As a result, three-fourths of digital growth will come from those companies adopting more technology in their business dealings. Bavaria has moved from a primarily agriculture focus to that of high-tech. Work was highlighted on autonomous driving, Internet and digital media startups and the upcoming “5G” deployment in Munich. Noted as the first 5G network being deployed – but I’m not sure if that is a 100% correct statement – quoting the speaker on this one. Bavaria’s goal is to be completely “debt-free” by 2030. Pretty impressive.
There was also a presentation from SAP and an expert panel on Industry 4.0; but the highlight of the day for me was Deutsche Telekom talking about the role of the cloud in the future. First up were the five mantras of the cloud:
Scalability- Reliability
- Security
- Simplicity
- Affordability
In looking at IoT examples and the role the cloud will play, the importance of smaller affordable sensors, faster networks and all data resident in the cloud were the key themes. The requirement for 24×7 cloud is “damn expensive” (their words, not mine) for a business. In order to get this where it needs to be financially there also needs to be a goal to achieve a zero-touch data center, meaning with no people in it. In the last year, Deutsche Telekom has increased its cloud revenue by 43%, compared to the industry average of 20%. The goal is to double this again by 2018.
Some innovative examples of how Deutsche Telekom is working with startups to realize the IoT vision in conjunction with their network and cloud services in the background were also part of the story.
There’s too much to include in one go; so stop by tomorrow for the highlights from day two.
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Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
