3 Take-Aways from Huawei Cloud’s APAC Partner Summit 2025 (Tech Strategy)

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I recently went to the Huawei Partner Summit in Phuket, which was pretty awesome. This was Huawei’s partner summit for the Asia Pacific region. So, lots of software and service partners from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and across the region.

Their big announcement was their new Partner Sales Acceleration Program (called 2.0). And especially its “go to market” support for partners in the region. That’s really important for sales and growth in 2025. I’ll talk about that below.

And overall, the partner network is a big deal for Huawei. Historically Huawei has mostly been an infrastructure provider. Originally providing telecommunications equipment for mobile networks and over time expanding to almost all telecommunications and digital infrastructure (edge devices, networks, cloud).

Huawei is now in next generation digital infrastructure business. They are creating the infrastructure that businesses and governments build their organizations, apps and services upon.

But that requires a huge network of partners that businesses and governments can work with, as opposed to Huawei selling and maintaining every service and app directly. Huawei’s direct sales in cloud are about 30% of their revenue, with the rest coming from partners such as resellers, software firms and other service and software providers.

That is actually a really interesting strategy question. Providing infrastructure and foundational technology requires partners and usually an ecosystem. That requires a different strategy than just selling a product or service that utilizes existing infrastructure. It’s the difference between being a retailer on a street and creating the streets and neighborhoods as well. The latter is much more of a team effort.

Ok. That said, let me just jump to my take-aways from the conference. And I’ll do a little ecosystem strategy at the end.

Take-Away 1: Huawei Cloud is “All In” on AI and Intelligence

The opening talk was by Jacqueline Shi, Huawei’s President for Global Cloud Marketing and Sales. You can see part of it here.

She said the priorities are:

  • Providing more and more AI services and solutions.
  • Building more capabilities for the partners – such as sales, marketing, and technical support.
  • Going deeper into industries with industry-specific solutions (with partners).

Basically, Huawei Cloud is all about AI and intelligence. Which means more investment, more software / services, and more industry-specific solutions.

Take-Away 2: Asia Pacific is “Must Win” Market for Huawei Cloud

They didn’t say this. But this was my own conclusion. AI Cloud is definitely the technology priority. And APAC is the #1 strategic priority after China. I suspect they view it as a “must win” market.

This is a game of scale. To thrive long-term, you need to be a global firm, not just a domestic one. That’ what gets you the scale to keep investing in technology – and to get your unit costs down. Asia is Huawei’s backyard and the region where it has the most advantages. So, I think they’re all in.

And the summit’s emphasis on the new partner sales acceleration program gave me the strong impression they are really going growth in the region.

This was also the message I got from Shang Haifeng, the President of Huawei Cloud for Asia Pacific. You can see part of his talk here.

He made a couple of quick introductory points – that:

  • Asia Pacific is great. It has 2B people. The average age is 30. And GDP growth is 4.5%.
  • Huawei Cloud is doing well in Asia. He cited 40% yoy revenue growth. And a 30% growth in developers (now at 50,000). That’s important.

He also gave some details on how they are building out their supporting cloud infrastructure for the region. They now have 5 centers in the region – Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong. These began in 2018 and the Philippines center was completed in December 2024. And each of these supports 3-4 Availability Zones (AZs) so that’s 18 AZs total in Asia Pacific right now.

Huawei Cloud is building out distributed computing and storage that is designed for AI. And that has high reliability and low latency. Their 5 main data centers in Asia Pacific have the most servers and computing power. And most have latency of under 25ms (for their experience circle). They also have secondary locations closer to major cities, with fewer servers but less latency.

Keep in mind, Huawei Cloud is rapidly building out an entire suite of both hardware and software / services. Their description for this is Cloud for AI and AI for Cloud.

  • Cloud for AI is their hardware and related infrastructure. That’s the distributed computing and full stack hardware. You can see this on the left in the photo below.
  • AI for Cloud are their increasingly intelligent services. That’s lots of foundation models. Plus, some interesting innovations in Data-AI convergence and Model as a Service. You can see this on the right in the below photo.

From the Huawei Twitter account:

But Mr. Shang’s main point was the details of the new Partner Sales Acceleration Program (2.0). And that’s probably what most of the +400 partners in attendance cared most about. Especially the “go to market” support.

Take-Away 3: The Partner Sales Acceleration Program Looks like Huawei’s Big Growth Initiative for AI Cloud in APAC

Here’s how Shang Haifeng presented the Partner Sales Acceleration Program (from Huawei’s Twitter account).

This is about growth. And the focus on joint solutions and jointly building new capabilities is interesting. You can see (behind Mr. Shang) the focus on Last Mile GTM (Go to Market) Support.

This second photo is a bit fuzzy but note the following:

  • 137% increase in Marketing Support
  • 150% increase in People Support and HR Investment

And the primary areas of interest for growth appear to:

  • Internet businesses
  • Finance businesses
  • Carrier businesses

If you want to learn more about Huawei Cloud’s partner program, look at KooVerse.

This is the infrastructure that is the backbone of their services (compute, storage, networking, security, models, etc.). It has Huawei KooGallery, which is their online marketplace for connecting independent service vendors (ISVs), developers, and customers with applications, software, and services.

The key client projects for partners to focus on (i.e., the silver bullets) appear to be:

  • Empowering DeepSeek. Helping with flexible deployment, local data and local fine tuning.
  • Database replacement
  • Mainframe modernization
  • Big data upgrades
  • Virtualization to cloud
  • Carrier 2B cloud
  • Flexus
  • Metastudio

There were two other speakers I thought were pretty interesting on this subject. One was Chen Weifeng, who works in the partner development program. And the other was Leon Yu, who does global markets and global ecosystem.

And you really want to think about partners and ecosystem building together.

Leon Yu had some interesting comments about building out a global ecosystem for digital infrastructure. That includes software partners and service partners. But it also includes developers, entrepreneurs and trainees.

Leon talked about building coordination across these groups in 4 areas:

  • Co-building. An example of co-building is OnePro, a Huawei partner that offers services for cloud-based backup and disaster recovery for businesses.
  • Co-selling. An example of co-selling is ASL in Hong Kong. This is a Huawei partner that does database and cloud migration services.
  • Co-cultivating talent. An example of co-cultivating talent is Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, which was at the conference (and where I used to teach). They have programs to train younger people and entrepreneurs in the technical aspects of AI cloud. Ecosystem building means a lot of work with students and professors across the APAC region.
  • Creating win-win opportunities

***

Ok. That’s most of what I wanted to cover.

As mentioned, ecosystem building creates some interesting strategy questions. The strategic approaches are different when you are building infrastructure as well as products and services.

I usually put businesses into four buckets:

  1. Product and service firms that operate mostly independently. These are most of the businesses we talk about. Think retailers, CPG brands, hospitals, etc. These are the retailers that have built their businesses on streets and other infrastructure that already exist. These businesses usually have a handful of partners in the supply chain and maybe further down the value chain. But they really don’t impact the infrastructure or greater ecosystem. I think of such businesses as solo tigers in the jungle (I like animal analogies). Or maybe as lion prides on the savannah. They really don’t change the environment they operate on.
  2. Firms that create and manage parts of the ecosystem. These businesses mostly focus on the interactions within the ecosystem. They connect parts of it together. They orchestrate and manage it interactions. Sometimes they build it. This is a lot of software firms that connect different businesses with their services. Or that provide the software languages and protocols that the ecosystem relies upon. In terms of animals, I think of these more like forests and root systems. Or bacteria or viruses. They exist only as a part of the greater ecosystem. But that’s not a great analogy.
  3. Platform business models. These businesses (like Meta, WeChat) are definitely ecosystem orchestrators but they are specialized in a few types of interactions. And they have a tremendous amount of control over one standardized part of the ecosystem. Such as Meta and social networks.
  4. Part Product-Part Ecosystem Businesses. These businesses do both 1 and 2. Smart car companies are definitely stand-alone firms competing in selling cars. But they are also deeply tied into a complicated auto supply chain and an advancing digital ecosystem. I put Huawei in this category. Lots of infrastructure but also some stand-alone products like smart watches.

Anyways, those are great analogies. But I find the 4 buckets helpful.

The more a firm moves into infrastructure and ecosystems, the more it needs alliances, associations and partners. It needs to work with standards organizations and other groups on the coordinated development of technologies and infrastructure.

Overall, it was a fascinating summit.

Cheers, Jeff

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Related articles:

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

  • AI Cloud

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

  • Huawei

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