Huawei, China’s leading smartphone maker, has put forward a strategic alliance in order to promote its cloud computing service, Huawei Cloud, as it aims to be one of the big five cloud computing companies in the world, Caixin reported.
The alliance works similar to the major three global airline alliances, which share informations internally. In the European and Latin American market, Huawei Cloud has chosen Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and France Télécom as its allies. While in the domestic market, Huawei Cloud plans to partner with Tianyi cloud, the cloud computing arm of China Telecom.
At Huawei Connect 2017 hosted by the company on September 5, its CEO Guo Ping, said the expansion of cloud computing services will eventually replace the sale of hardware. All the services, including artificial intelligence, Internet of things, big data or video analysis will be provided in the form of cloud computing.
Guo thinks this trend will lead to the centralization of cloud computing technology. However, in consideration of data sovereignty, which stops data from flowing across borders, Guo estimates that there will be only five public cloud computing service providers in the world, and Huawei needs to be one of them.
For now, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the top two in the US, while Alibaba Cloud leads the Chinese market with its first-mover advantages.