Huawei angles for piece of Kenya’s Kshs 17 billion data center industry

Huawei Technologies is angling for a slice of the multi-billion-shilling cloud computing industry in Kenya with a new solution known as the Intelligent Cloud Network that has been designed and built to address key challenges facing organizations that are going through the digitalization journey.

With this solution, Huawei has become the first in the industry to roll out autonomous driving for datacenter networks and slashing operating expenses by up to 30 percent. This solves problems such as multiple data centers that have been built over a period of time, use different architectures, on separate clouds. In such a case, each data center may use distinct standards, leading to siloed management.

Speaking when he announced the introduction of the service, Huawei Chief Technology Officer for Southern Africa Mr. Matamela Mashau noted that by 2025, the firm expects that more than 80 percent of organizations will have migrated their services to the cloud.

“We are in a multi-cloud environment, characterized by the presence of public and private clouds with the former being used by the public sector and the latter, the private sector”, said Mashau.

Kenya, pointed out Mashau, is a primary data center hub and is considered the gateway to the East African region. Nairobi, the capital city, is a favorable location for data center development. In the coming years, the market is expected to witness data center investments in other cities, with Mombasa becoming a popular hub. The country’s data center market is estimated at Kshs 17 billion (USD 170 million) currently and projected to double over the next three years to Kshs 34 billion (USD 342 million) by 2026.

The significance of networks to enterprises, he explained, is similar to that of the blood vessels to humans, with data functioning as the blood that carries oxygen and nutrients. The quality of the network thus determines the efficiency and productivity of the organization.

Huawei’s end to end Intelligent Cloud Network solutions include CloudCampus 3.0, CloudFabric 3.0, CloudWAN 3.0 and HiSec 3.0. These latest generation cloud technologies are all built to deliver an optimal cloudification experience across wide area networks, data center networks, campus networks and network security.

It is digital, intelligent and service oriented. This means that the network status is digitally sensed. This real time status visualization presents the physical networks to the digital world as it is centrally managed. In addition, once the network is digitalized, the organization can then introduce enhancements including Artificial Intelligence components and Big Data to elevate their level of intelligence.

This fixes demand and usage of the network and cloud usage, improving trouble shooting efficiency, security defense and traffic steering. Furthermore, it is available as a one-click subscription service. By being a network as a service option, it offers a more flexible full life cycle future spanning planning, construction, maintenance and optimization.

Mashau observed that data centers are increasingly becoming central to the running of local economies and organizations, pointing out that they play a fundamental role as everything that happens online is housed in a data center.

Challenges faced by legacy networks include long deployment where it takes some times months to install it while the cloud enables it to be done in minutes thus saving time. Huawei built the Intelligent Cloud Network Solution to speed up service cloudification. This solution is a great fit to supply non-stop computing power and intelligence to diverse industries for a leap forward in productivity and a new impetus for the digital economy just as the power grid transmits electricity to numerous households.

The data communications industry is fast evolving as networks are gradually becoming IP based, meaning IP addresses are being assigned to everything that is electronic. The result is IP networks that connect applications on one end and devices on the other end.

Digital transformation now expands to a digital government, digital society, digital economy and digital ecosystem leading to scenarios such as smart cities, smart healthcare and smart manufacturing. Against this backdrop, the focus is on how to coordinate and build cloud computing infrastructure, consolidate data centers and propel enterprises into cloud based and platform centric operations that aggregate data resources and promote big data industry clusters.

The solution will be distributed locally through Huawei’s channel partners.

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