CEO discusses Huawei efforts around network operations and maintenance, cloudification

During an event in Shanghai, Huawei Rotating CEO Eric Xu said in the near-term future, by 2025, technology will have advanced to create mobile networks “beyond our imagination.”

Xu was speaking to mobile operator representatives during the Huawei User Group Meeting at the World Expo Center; the event focuses on network transformation, operations, maintenance, services and business experience.

“Supporting secure and stable network operations is one of Huawei’s social responsibilities,” Xu told attendees. “Networks and IT systems will soon be fully cloudified and connected. By 2025, there will be 100 billion connections worldwide, and the data traffic and coverage of networks will be beyond our imagination. Faced with complex network environments, Huawei will remain committed to providing customers with high-quality products, solutions, and services, and addressing challenges together with them.”

He outlined five areas on which the ICT vendor wants to more closely collaborate with its customers: building a joint product definition community, optimizing the issue to resolution process, using big data for smart operations and maintenance, addressing network challenges created by full cloudification of services, and approaches for talent transformation.

Speaking to the goal of joint product definition communities, Xu said the company “has studied how online communities address problems and built the Joint Product Definition Community, where Huawei users from across the world can join the community and directly express their needs or improvement suggestions for our products. This is a good engagement model, allowing us to rapidly improve product quality and better meet users’ network needs.”

Further discussing potential operational and maintenance improvements, XU noted, “For existing network equipment and functions, software and hardware are coupled, as are hardware maintenance and managed services. Using alarm indicators is one of the most common [operations and maintenance]approaches. However, as the functions of certain network elements are achieved through software, software and hardware will be decoupled. Then there will be no alarm indicators for a particular service because it no longer has any piece of hardware to go with it.”