Huawei hosts first Africa Carrier Cloud Transformation Summit

Huawei hosted the first Africa Carrier Cloud Transformation Summit. It is themed ‘+ Cloud, Grow Together’ representatives from governments, carriers, and consulting companies came together.

The summit aims to discuss consequential topics such as IT development trends in the telecom industry, carriers’ cloud transformation strategies, and successful business practices of B2B cloud-based services.

The Summit was held to help carriers accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies, create new businesses, and unleash Africa’s digital productivity.

Huawei also launched the carrier-oriented distributed cloud solution, which helps carriers cloudify internal IT systems and better support carriers in building on-premise B2B clouds. Through cloud-network integration, the solutions accelerate carriers’ network monetization and open new industrial markets.

Hou Wei, President of Huawei Northern Africa Carrier Business Department, pointed out that cloud technology has been integrated into the digital transformation of various industries and has become a key force in restructuring their economic structure. Africa, he noted, has huge opportunities with digital transformation. He advised carriers to adopt the “CT+cloud” mode for cloud-based transformation, fully exploit the advantages of the telecom industry, and leverage cloud-based transformation to unleash the full value of telecom networks and services.

Kris Szaniawski, Research Director of Omdia, said that the compound growth rate (CAGR) of the enterprise cloud service market in the Middle East and Africa is expected to reach 21% in the next five years, higher than the global average of 17%. The development of cloud services in Africa is still in the initial stage, he said. With the deepening of digital transformation strategies in African countries, enterprises’ requirements for cloud services are increasing rapidly.

Tariku Demissie, CTO of Ethiopia Telecom, observed that cloud services have become a key engine for Ethiopia Telecom to achieve new levels of business growth. Huawei’s cloud-based industry scenario solution has helped Ethiopia Telecom quickly open up the digital market for large and medium-sized enterprises. In November 2022, Ethiopia Telecom released the B2B cloud solution for all industries. Five days after its cloud went live, all phase 1 cloud resources were sold, reflecting the huge pent-up demand for digitalization in the industry.

Chen Xuejun, Director of Huawei Carrier IT Marketing Solution Sales Department, pointed out that the core of carrier cloud transformation is to understand data, networks, and applications. Huawei’s distributed cloud architecture meets African carriers’ internal service transformation and B2B service growth requirements.