Huawei Cloud Stack Leads Hybrid Cloud Innovation and Growth in Emerging Asia-Pacific

Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies are the new normal in many enterprise and government settings. 89% of organizations operate two or more clouds, according to the 2023 Flexera State of Cloud report. 73% have a hybrid cloud architecture in place, meaning a mix of public and private cloud and/or on–premises infrastructure.

Mr. Zeng Xingyun, President of Huawei Cloud Asia Pacific, notes that there are multiple factors driving multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies. While many enterprises have reached a consensus on the value of cloud computing-based digital transformation and intelligent modernization, and cloudification has become a definite trend, but digital transformation is a continuous process. Enterprises need the flexibility to move according to their own development pace and stage – and to adapt to changing market conditions, regulatory requirements, and other variables.

“To accommodate evolving service needs, enterprises may need to leverage different cloud patterns,” Zeng said.

Hybrid cloud has become to preferred enabler of that flexibility, allowing enterprises and governments to leverage the powerful innovation of public cloud technologies while retaining the control and choice allowed by private cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Many enterprises and governments have accumulated significant private data workloads and usually face many regulations. As a result, they prefer to store data locally for compliance, security, and privacy reasons.

Several other trends overlap hybrid cloud becoming the new normal, according to Zeng:

Data is a common current that flows through each of these trends.

“Data is reshaping the way enterprise operate, make decisions, and innovate, driving a shift towards data-driven modernization,” Zeng said. “However, enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges in unlocking the value of their data.”

For example, Enterprises and governments are generating new data at a scale and speed that legacy infrastructure and devices are unable to cope with resulting in low value mining efficiency. another. They’re also several other trends siloed data process technology stacks and prevent free data flow and sharing, which in turn limits data exchange, movement, and collaboration, Zeng says. And all of this is happening as the demand for data – both from intelligent applications and data consumers of all kinds – is growing exponentially, but meeting that demand is too time-consuming and labor-intensive. 

That’s where cloud technology comes in - Hybrid cloud enables the speed, scale, flexibility, and adaptability necessary to unlock data value in a way that can’t be accomplished solely with legacy infrastructure.

Huawei Leads Hybrid Cloud in Emerging Asia-Pacific

Huawei is uniquely positioned to deliver hybrid cloud solutions in Asia-Pacific (APAC) markets, thanks to more than 20 years of experience with local customers and industries there. Huawei Public Cloud has achieved 20x growth in emerging Asia-Pacific (APAC) during the last four years. In 2023, revenue from Huawei Cloud APAC grew 77%, with revenue from the hybrid cloud segment increasing 106%.

According to Frost & Sullivan’s Emerging Asia-Pacific Hybrid Cloud Market Report 2022, Huawei Cloud ranks first in the leader quadrant for hybrid cloud in emerging Asia-Pacific in terms of market performance, technological innovation, and customer service. It also ranked No. 1 in the hybrid cloud market in Hong Kong (China), Thailand, Bangladesh and ranked No.2 in Singapore, Malaysia.

Mr. Hu Yuhai, Vice President of Huawei Hybrid Cloud, attributes Huawei’s hybrid leadership to several other factors as well, including:

Hu Yuhai, Vice President of Huawei Hybrid Cloud

Embracing Cloud: Advice for Enterprises & Governments

Zeng shared recommendations on cloud adoption for enterprises and governments in Asia-Pacific:

What’s In Store For The Future

Huawei hopes to work with broader industry to identify more anchor points for how hybrid cloud patterns can benefit a wider array of customers and industries.

In addition to data-AI convergence, cloud-native security and operations, expect AI to be a major focal point in terms of future innovation and capabilities.

“We think AI is reshaping every industry,” Zeng says. “However, there are still some major obstacles to AI's further advancement.”

Those include low accuracy and poor generalization, as well as difficulty in obtaining sufficient training data, as well as labor-intensive processes in training models. Large models are seen by many as a promising way to scale up AI across industries, and to move from dedicated, task-specific AI to artificial general intelligence (AGI) that promises to solve virtually any problem.

Pre-trained large models only need a small number of samples for fine-tuning or retraining, before they can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. This helps scale up AI in enterprises' core production systems for real value creation.

Zeng notes that a three-layer structure is ideal for AI adopting and operating models.

“Sitting at L0 are general foundation models, L1 are industry-tailored foundation models, and L2 are task-specific models,” Zeng says. “Together, they ensure a good generalization performance, high accuracy, and fast deployment.”

Huawei is already delivering in this area: Its Pangu large models support this three-layer structure, and Huawei Cloud Stack now offers that capability.

“It's the first hybrid cloud that provides large models in the industry,” Zeng says. “This helps users build their own large models in the local data center in one-stop mode.”

In 2024, Huawei Cloud launched a "Leap2Cloud" initiative to help more customers and partners in Asia Pacific bid farewell to virtualization and embrace cloud transformation. According to Hu, Huawei Cloud envisions promoting wide adoption of the "Dive into Cloud" concept across all industries to unlock a new era of digital and intelligent transformation.