LIVE FROM HUAWEI ANALYST SUMMIT 2016, SHENZHEN: Eric Xu, rotating CEO of Huawei, today introduced the company’s “All Cloud” strategy, describing this as the “most effective means” to support operators as they transition to become digital service providers.

Likening it to the move to an “all IP” environment, the executive said that in the next few years the company will “fully cloudify all our products and solutions”.

“We hope as we move towards all cloud, Huawei can become an active advocate, promoter and ultimately a leader in all cloud, so that fully cloud products and solutions can enable our telco and enterprise customers to be successful,” he said.

The move toward an all cloud environment involves “the full reconstruction of infrastructure networks” in four areas – equipment, network, services and operations. This is intended to create “systematic strengths” in pooled hardware resources, fully distributed software architecture, and full automation.

Xu noted that while some steps have already been taken down this road, technologies such as Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) only address sharing hardware resources. “It does not bring too much benefit to the agility of the network,” he said.

“Even with NFV, we still adopt a traditional method for managing the software architecture and operations model. If we can move another step forward and use the cloudification concept to make network software fully distributed and automated, we can realise Network Function Cloudification” – subsequently noting that the NFC acronym is already used elsewhere in the industry.

In a statement, Huawei said that it intends to “seize new business opportunities by developing cloud-based IoT, video services and cloud service platforms”. It will also promote the cloudification of operational systems, which it said will be important to operators looking to establish advantages in agile operations.

Xu noted that, as with the evolution to all IP, it will be “a long process, a long journey,” and that “different telecoms service providers will choose different pacings and rhythms to the cloud”. However, he said that “we have to move faster ourselves”, cautioning that “for operators and equipment providers that did not move to IP, we can see what happened to them”.