At Huawei’s Win-Win Innovation Week held recently, Chen Xuejun from Huawei's Carrier IT Marketing & Solution Sales Department delivered a keynote speech demonstrating how Huawei Cloud helps carriers accelerate cloud transformation to drive new growth.
It is widely acknowledged across the telecommunications industry that the growth of carriers' conventional services is slowing, with the global growth rate reaching just 4% for 2021.
However, carriers are rolling out services powered by new technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, AI, big data, and edge computing, and these services are creating new spaces for carrier growth. Chen said that for carriers, this new wave of services can be seen as ‘the second growth curve’ that will allow them to accelerate monetization of their networks.
To support this, carriers need a more robust, modern ICT infrastructure. Improving operational efficiency, increasing agility, and reshaping customer experience are important, but unlocking more growth opportunities is always the ultimate goal. More and more carriers are transforming themselves to become comprehensive ICT service providers, and the key to this transformation lies in bridging the capability gap in IT infrastructure.
It goes without saying that the industry has high barriers to entry, with its complex network and service architectures. Different carriers have their own unique strengths in different areas. They need to plan their cloud strategy, choose the right path to the cloud, and select cloud partners based on their own unique situations. Chen explained that carriers need to develop a cloud strategy that can play to their advantages, maximizing the value of carriers' network assets and driving sustainable growth for their conventional core businesses.
Cloud transformation is about using cloud to boost CT, and combining the cloud with carriers' unique advantages to further enhance those advantages. It must facilitate agile development and accelerate time-to-market of new services, helping carriers win over digital consumers by augmenting their current advantages in CT networks and vast customer bases. Additionally, cloud transformation must help carriers improve internal IT efficiency to support continuous growth.
Choosing the right path to the cloud is about ensuring data security, system stability, and business agility during and after the cloud journey.
Carriers run many large-scale IT systems, such as BSS, OSS as well as Internet applications, development and testing platforms, big data platform, etc. These systems are mostly independent yet they interconnect with each other. For these systems, it's rarely enough to just lift and shift them to the cloud. Their paths to the cloud must be planned systematically based on their different characteristics.
Huawei believes that the purpose of cloud transformation should be three-fold for carriers: accelerating network monetization as well as service innovation, and driving operational excellence for sustainable growth. With the cloud, carriers can deliver network resources to enterprise customers as flexible cloud services or as combinations of them. Using comprehensive cloud services from Huawei Cloud, carriers can accelerate TTM, allowing them to quickly respond to new demand and seize new markets.
In the digital era, carriers need to be able to quickly roll out new services to quickly respond to changing demand, and cloud is a good way to accelerate all this. Huawei has extensive practices in innovation in telecom applications and network services, and can use cloud services to help carriers accelerate TTM by adopting agile development methods. By deploying an innovation platform on the cloud, carriers can accelerate development from months to just weeks.
In Africa, Huawei has helped some carriers deploy their mobile wallet platform on Huawei Cloud. The service rollout time was reduced from months to weeks, and resources can now be scaled out in just a few minutes. In addition, these carriers can have access to Huawei Cloud's rich ecosystem and hence faster access to new capabilities.
Cloud is also used to drive operational excellence and sustainable growth of carriers' conventional services. Carriers all over the world are building 5G networks, but even once they have done so, they still face the challenge of acquiring 5G users in a fast and sustainable manner.
Take an Asian carrier for example, it counted that only 10% of its 5G subscribers are using 5G service packages and 5G network coverage. Huawei uses the distributed data lake solution for collaborative analysis of business support system (BSS) data, improving operations efficiency and boosting the marketing conversion for 5G provisioning by 180%.
Huawei's Carrier IT also provides cloud consulting services for carriers, backed up by its many years of expertise in the field and extensive best practices acquired in delivering carrier cloud projects over the years. Huawei starts the consultation with a survey to understand the carrier customer's current situation, then provides a cloud blueprint tailored to the carrier's needs, identifying the right path to the cloud and designing feasible cloud migration plans.
Huawei encourages a step-by-step approach to cloud migration, starting with the easiest items and working towards the more complex ones, as well as moving from less important workloads to more mission-critical ones. Chen added that the vendor also matches the cloud migration process to the application lifecycle using a set of comprehensive methods to help carriers determine the right path to the cloud. In addition to its existing service tools for telecom networks, Huawei has developed professional cloud migration and management tools.
Chen concluded by affirming his belief that carriers can unlock new, significant growth opportunities through cloud transformation, as long as they play to their unique advantages. He noted that Huawei is ready to work with carriers around the world to accelerate their cloud journey, build new capabilities, and embrace new growth.
