Huawei unveiled its “everything-as-a-service” offering at its cloud conference in Dubai this week.
The combined offering of infrastructure and technology as services is also referred to as “expertise-as-a-service”.
The company now has 27 regions in 190 countries, and says it was the first to establish a cloud region in South Africa. It is spending 15% of its annual revenue on R&D, which was estimated at $20 billion last year.
Ranjit Rajan, vice-president at IDC MEA, told the Huawei Cloud Summit Middle East and Africa (MEA) 2022 that the pandemic prompted 40% of organisations it surveyed to digitalise and increase automation in their operations, which had, among other benefits, improved their business insights.
Cloud adoption is now the foundation on which a digital business is built, but 45% of organisations are still piloting cloud initiatives, and only 15% of those polled are in the implementation stage, he noted.
The ‘triggers’ for cloud adoption include cost optimisation, the ease of implementing e-commerce solutions, and the fact that legacy systems are not able to keep up with new business demands, he said.
Cost also features in the impediments to cloud adoption, with respondents reporting opacity in the economics of cloud, as well as a lack of clarity in deployment models.
Rajan said IDC expects spending on public cloud services in the MEA region to grow at 28% this year to $6.2 billion, of which 40% will be on software-as-a-service business applications, and 30% on infrastructure-as-a-service.
While most enterprise workloads will remain on-premises or in private clouds, the majority of organisations will operate a hybrid cloud environment, he predicted.
Rajan also raised the matter of data sovereignty, and said this would lead to cloud providers establishing sovereign clouds in customers’ countries.
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