LIVE FROM OPERATIONS TRANSFORMATION FORUM 2017, HONG KONG: Huawei’s Global Technology Services (GTS) division established a new department to provide operators with business support to help them optimise ROI.

The Consulting & System Integration (C&SI) department was set up to develop business solutions to solve operators’ transformational problems, said Bill Tang, president of Huawei GTS.

The new department is organised across functional domains, so can offer end-to-end solutions covering software, hardware and consulting, he said: “We expect C&SI to be the biggest department in GTS.” Already it has 5,000 staff globally, which includes more than 500 business and network consultants. GTS is part of Huawei’s carrier business group.

Over the past three years, Tang said GTS has been accelerating services with the development of technology: “Now we are no longer focusing only on technical architecture but looking at how we can solve business issues.”

To do this, he said C&SI must improve its efficiency in identifying problems clients encounter and find solutions: “Solving the business issues is most important, it’s not the technology. We need to build sustainable models for operators.”

Investments in AI
The organisation plans to invest $200 million over the next three years and is also investing in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies across a number of areas to improve things like predictive maintenance, digital optimisation and network planning.

GTS is focused on supporting operators make internal improvements such as more precise investments and improved operational efficiency Tang said, adding that many local and overseas operator customers also are looking for ways to speed up growth.

“We expect to be busier in the future because we’re not only focusing on the investment but also on network improvements. That’s a big change in GTS.”

Looking specifically its objectives, he said C&SI aims to consolidate and share best practices across the operator ecosystem as well as spur new joint innovation to speed up digital transformation. It will develop blueprints and architecture models.

The point is to accelerate digital transformation and it is working with open systems as well as the Open ROADS community Tang said. It has more than 70 partners in the NFV, SDN, data centre and IoT domains.

He said C&SI has already completed projects with HKT and Safaricom.