I recently sat down in William Dong, President of Huawei Cloud Marketing, to talk about what Huawei is doing in Asia. There is a video of our interview here.
Cloud in Asia, especially AI Cloud, is on my short list of tech topics to pay close attention to. Specifically, I am looking at the build out of the next generation digital infrastructure in the region. And how this is, in many cases, leapfrogging the West.
And Huawei is a big part of that story. They are very active across the region. Think building data centers in Malaysia and mobile networks in Indonesia. They have a combination of software (cloud, AI) and hardware (storage, networking, edge computing) capabilities, which makes them a unique player in this.
So, it was a real opportunity to talk with William. He has great visibility into the next generation of digital infrastructure being built in Asia. Plus, he’s a pretty fun guy.
I’ve written a lot about various Huawei’s AI initiatives in China and Southeast Asia. You can find a couple of them here.
- 3 Take-Aways from Sabrina Meng’s Keynote at Huawei Connect
- Huawei’s AI Tech Stack Is Pangu Plus Hardware Plus Partnerships
Or if you prefer audio, here is a recent podcast on my visit in Beijing.
First a little background. Then I’ll get to my 3 lessons from our discussion.
How William Dong Ended Up in the Epicenter of Digital Asia
First, William is my kind of guy. He did applied mathematics at Southeast University in Jiangsu. And I generally like math and engineering types. I’m physics by background.
Upon graduation, William joined Huawei. It’s common for talented people to join Huawei right out of college and then spend their entire careers there. That’s common at Huawei but you almost never see that at other Chinese tech companies. In fact, China staff are notorious for changing jobs every 1-2 years.
At its core, Huawei is a human resources company. Yes, they make technology products. But these are constantly becoming obsolete and must be replaced. So, they are really in the business of harnessing brainpower at scale. That means culture and human resources. It’s also why the US political moves have largely failed. I’ve written about this previously.
William eventually ended up in Marketing. That’s not uncommon for tech and math science-intensive people at technology intensive businesses. Having guys like William who can build advanced models in marketing can be powerful. And they can talk well about engineering-based products, such as telecommunications equipment.
Over the next twenty years, William rose to the top of Huawei Cloud Marketing. And that puts William at the center of the current action.
Ok, here are my lessons learned from our talk.
Lesson 1: AI Cloud Services Are a Digital Superpower Available to All
Digital technologies, and cloud services in particular, are leveling and democratizing technologies. They are unlike most all previous technologies that required advanced infrastructure and skills. You can’t deploy MRI machines until you have a developed hospital system. You can’t create television shows and movies unless you have cable networks and satellites.
But any company in any geography can directly tap into these cloud services. You just turn on the tap. And suddenly you can match the capabilities of the advanced companies in the advanced countries. That’s really powerful in regions like Asia where we have a mix of capabilities and development stages. For example, South Korea and China are very advanced economically and in terms of their tech capabilities. Thailand and Malaysia have significant digital talent but are less advanced in their digital infrastructure. The Philippines and Sri Lanka are significantly less developed. But all of these countries can access cloud services directly.
Plus, you can now add to this the emergence of generative AI. Cloud services were already exciting. But GenAI takes it to the next level. It is supercharging the digital transformation story.
Finally, there is the rising Asia story. It is the world’s most rapidly advancing region. Infrastructure (bridges, high speed rail) and cities are being rapidly built. Colleges are churning out literally millions of engineers each year. The middle class is growing. And GDP per capita and household incomes are on a steady march upwards.
Overall, it’s hard to find anywhere more exciting than the intersection of cloud, AI and Asia. That’s pretty much why I live here. And William is in such an interesting position. He is literally sitting at the intersection. Hence the interview.
You really can’t underestimate how much AI-infused cloud services are a leveling force in business and society. Any business can easily tap into these services and have top tier digital capabilities.
That is significant in the US. But it’s a digital superpower in most developing economies. The delta of improvement is far more dramatic. It’s the easiest and usually most powerful next step for the digitization of an enterprise, industry or country.
William made this point a few times. He said that when a company wants to digitize, cloud is the best move. It can provide all the technologies, regardless of development of a country. And then there is no technology gap with other countries after you connect.
And that was the case before the breakout of generative AI.
Lesson 2: Infrastructure Services (IaaS) Are Getting the Most Adoption Right Now
I’m always trying to keep an eye on what is actually being adopted right now. As opposed to things that are cool or may happen in the future.
According to William, infrastructure (IaaS) is growing the fastest for Huawei in the region right now. So that’s accessing cloud resources like computing, network, and storage. Which makes sense. You can’t do a lot of services or apps until you have the infrastructure and data in place. And that is the key distinction with the West. In Asia, there isn’t a 30-year history of building on premise servers and enterprise capabilities.
Infrastructure as a Service also plays to Huawei’s strengths versus other cloud providers. They are almost uniquely capable of offering an end-to-end solution. From edge devices to connectivity to cloud and services. They can build the data centers, create the mobile network and offer the cloud services. The network piece (building base stations, etc.) is interesting because it lets them offer differentiated performance for cloud services. If you are the one building the network capabilities, you can offer lower latency, greater performance, scalable and more abundant storage and other resources.
So, it’s a lot of infrastructure building right now. And once you have the infrastructure, the next thing is to find suitable scenarios. That’s lots of platform and software apps and services (PaaS and SaaS).
I’ve looked into a lot of Huawei Cloud’s cases in Asia (outside of China). I found lots of building out of network capabilities and data centers.
Lesson 3: Finance and Thailand Are Moving Particularly Fast in Cloud
I asked about the progress in APAC. Which countries are moving faster in digital? William mentioned that Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand are making good progress. Note: Huawei is launching Huawei Cloud in the Philippines in October.
Within this, Thailand in becoming a case study in digital infrastructure (my opinion). The government was very active and effective in getting 5G deployed across the country (via the Prime Minister’s Committee for 5G). Thailand is now #3 in the world for 5G.
Thailand’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (MDES) has recently detailed their new “Cloud First” strategy. Thailand is positioning itself as the digital leader of Southeast Asia. And this is the logical next step. Now that the connectivity is in place, you start building out the data infrastructure.
Cloud First (initially) means building data centers and standardizing data storage and sharing across the country. This is basically infrastructure work and once this is done, we should see a slew of new apps and platforms. This is starting with government but also in enterprise.
Huawei has been the key partner in all of this. This is the 6th year for Huawei Cloud in Thailand. And in 2023, Huawei Thailand won the Prime Minister Award as the “Best of Contributor in Human Capital Development Award”. As well as the Cybersecurity Excellence Award. And the Award as Digital International Corporation of the Year.
They put out the details last week at the Huawei Thailand conference. Lots of use cases discussed. But the cool one was the humanoid Kuova robot they had at their event (which is powered by Huawei’s Pangu foundation model). Plus, they had some other cool robots at the event.
In terms of industries, William mentioned that finance is moving quickly. Definitely Singapore, with its deep talent bench and new digital banks, is the country to watch. But I’m also watching Thailand.
The digitization of finance is centered on banks right now. William mentioned this is a lot about moving banking out of banks. Pushing banking capabilities and services into smartphones and retail stores. With less being done by visits to the bank. And there are lots of important security and regulatory considerations in finance, so being stronger in hardware is a Huawei advantage.
Outside of finance, we are seeing steady progress in industry and manufacturing. This area takes longer to deploy. There is a lot of rewiring of factories, adding IoT everywhere, and building out digital-first operations and management. It’s a longer, slower process than the digitization of banking or ecommerce. But the payoff is likely greater in the long-term. You can get a powerful AI feedback loop between use and deployment in industry and the industry knowledge of the system.
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That’s it for my take-aways. It was a fun talk and you can see the video here.
Cheers, Jeff
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From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:
- Cloud Services
- AI
- Thailand
From the Company Library, companies for this article are:
- Huawei AI Cloud
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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.
I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.
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