LIVE FROM HUAWEI CONNECT: Huawei’s industry event in Shanghai opened today with the vendor and its partner SAP warning that the biggest challenge in migrating to a cloud infrastructure is not building the platform but creating real value for customers and the business.

SAP CIO Thomas Saueressig (pictured above) insisted that technology is not the problem. “We need to lift the discussion beyond the technology and focus on the user impact and how to improve people’s lives.”

Delivering the keynote this afternoon, he said “user-centricity is the new paradigm in the cloud-based world.”

Huawei rotating CEO Ken Hu (pictured below) agreed, pointing out in his presentation that while migrating to the cloud can be a challenging process from a technical point of view, what’s more important is generating value from the cloud – for the customer and the business.
Huawei-Hu
“Every company, every industry, every ecosystem is being reshaped by the cloud. Cloud is having an important impact on society. It’s not just technology models, but business models and people’s mindset.”

Hu noted that over the past ten years companies like Google, Amazon and Tencent have led the cloud era, which he referred to as cloud 1.0. Their cloud-based platforms allowed them to build disruptive business models, which he said “awakened traditional industries”.

But now all industries are moving to use cloud to support their digital transformations, he said. “By 2025 all enterprises will use cloud technology, with 85 per cent of enterprise workloads powered by the cloud by that time.”

Surging data use
Highlighting the dramatic increase in data creation, SAP’s Saueressig said 90 per cent of all data generated by humans has been created in the last two years. By 2020 there will be nine billion mobile devices, with average daily data usage increasing to 1.5Gb/s.

According to IDC, cloud service providers this year will for the first time build more data centres than traditional enterprises, which he said clearly demonstrates how strong the move to the cloud has become.

He noted that the journey to the cloud requires a transition period that will take some time. And because companies have different needs, he said it’s important to offer hybrid scenarios to give firms a choice in how they make the transition.

The challenges of security and privacy as well as integration into companies’ day-to-day operations are constant concerns and require deep partnerships to address, he added.

Digital strategy
Earlier in the day Huawei enterprise executives highlighted the need for companies to have a digital transformation strategy, citing Forrester research that shows only 4 per cent of companies fully understand their approach to digital businesses. Just 25 per cent of companies across all industries have a formal digital business strategy.

Nigel Fenwick, Forrester VP and principal analyst, said: “CIOs must move technology from the back office to the front office.”

Huawei Connect consolidates three of the vendor’s conferences it organised in the past, namely its cloud, networking and developers summits, into a single event that is expected to attract more than 10,000 visitors here in Shanghai this week.