Huawei to compete with Alibaba for cloud market

Starting this year, Huawei will expand into public cloud services, the Chinese-technology giant announced. And while not explicitly stated, the move pits it against Alibaba, which, in turn, is rushing to catch up with Amazon.com, the global market leader.

“We will invest heavily in building an open and trusted public cloud platform, which will be the foundation of a Huawei Cloud Family,” said Eric Xu, Huawei’s CEO. “This family will include public clouds we develop together with operators, and public clouds that we operate on our own.”

The Shenzhen-based Huawei said it will expand in cloud computing with a dedicated division that will recruit 2,000 more people.

From the logistics perspective, all three competitors are stakeholders in varying ways due to their footprints in logistics and technology.

Last month, for example, Huawei signed a memorandum of understanding with Deutsche Post-DHL Supply Chain to develop a range of supply chain services for customers using industrial-grade web-connected hardware and infrastructure. Adding cloud services to its portfolio makes Huawei an even more serious contender.

William Xu, executive director and chief strategy marketing officer at Huawei, told the 14th annual Huawei Global Analyst Summit that, “digital transformation opens up immense new potential for value-driven growth in traditional industries.” Xu noted that the cloud is key to modern connectivity.

Both Huawei and Alibaba have some catching up to do. Amazon, Google and Microsoft, collectively, control 82 percent of the internet-as-a-service market. For China to catch up, local firms will first have to convince international firms that data on Chinese servers is secure and safe from state infiltration.

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