African organisations now have an opportunity to leapfrog the rest of the world, moving directly into a fully digital era. However, they must advance through their digital transformation journeys now. This is according to Roc Bai, VP: Huawei Cloud Southern Africa.
Bai says: “The digital evolution brings a new way for humans to interact with the world. Today we live in an era of data-driven development and companies that fail to keep up with the progress of the times will fall behind and become obsolete. The development of the information society in many African countries lags the progress made in other regions in Europe and the United States, making it important for them to fast-track development.”
Bai highlights that organisations planning a digital transformation strategy should align with top digital transformation trends, including process automation, re-engineering and productivity improvements, in order to achieve operational excellence, enable a hybrid and remote workforce and deliver insights at scale throughout the organisation by building capabilities in data and enterprise intelligence.
Benefits of digital transformation
Successful digital transformation can create value for business in three key ways, he says: “Organisations that transform successfully deliver a better experience for customers, users, partners, suppliers and employees, resulting in customer satisfaction and revenue growth. They also benefit from improved efficiency in R&D, production, distribution and service, and reduce work costs and management risks. Importantly, digitally transformed organisations are able to innovate. With the deep integration of digital transformation technologies, business models will change profoundly and the shape of products and services will change fundamentally, helping us to tap new growth points.
"Where skills and resources are lacking, it is important to have a partner such as Huawei, who is sincerely willing to help you grow and develop rapidly.”
He notes that Huawei Cloud is one of the first cloud service provider to deploy nodes in Africa and the first to deploy its network across Africa. So far, Huawei Cloud has built data centres in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, and plans to open its Egypt node this year.
Huawei Cloud streamlines digital transformation
Bai says Huawei Cloud inherits Huawei's more than 10 years of industry experience in the ICT field, deeply understands industry scenarios and combines the capabilities of ecological partners to find the right technology for industry customers and do a good job of implementation.
Bai says: “Huawei Cloud advocates deep digitalisation and everything is a service. We continuously invest in building the optimal infrastructure and constructing a global storage network; we strengthen R&D and technology investment to accelerate application modernisation; we continuously summarise and refine industry digital transformation experience to enable industry to go to the cloud, thus helping our customers to realise digital transformation more easily on top of Huawei Cloud. We also release the latest technologies such as AI and tools for software development, data governance and digital content production, as well as integrated development tools, all openly on the cloud, so that enterprises can access and use them as they wish.”
Technologies for change
Technology drives transformation, says Bai. From Huawei's perspective, the following technologies are critical:
- Unified cloud infrastructure: The unified cloud infrastructure helps businesses quickly provision required cloud service products and instances, accelerate service roll-out and implement DevOps.
- Unified data lake base: Business digital transformation data is the core, only to give full play to the value of data, to effectively achieve efficient decision-making and business value mining; big data, data warehousing and a data governance platform are very important technical components of the data lake.
- Unified integration platform: A unified integration platform enables the integration and docking of data, messages and APIs between cross-business systems so that each business system can be integrated, flowed and shared as efficiently as possible while ensuring security, thus realising cross-business boundaries and maximising the value of information
- Unified security control platform: Digital transformation should consider security compliance, security protection and security operations, through security service capabilities and a security governance platform to help enterprises take into account security compliance in the process of digital transformation and provide escort for business.
Supporting the transformation journey
Digital transformation is a deep business change for an organisation and Bai notes that five areas of change are generally recommended to support transformation.
- Change of consciousness: Enterprises need to have a unified cognition of digital transformation from business level and technology level.
- Organisational transformation: The business and IT teams need to co-operate with each other and the management of IT needs to be grouped into a unified department, for unified planning and distribution.
- Culture shift: Organisations should consider how they create value from the outputs of others and what outputs individuals can contribute to others to help them achieve better results.
- Transformation of methods: Organisations should realise the digitalisation of objects, online processes and structured rules. For example, Huawei has built a contract management centre to realise the capabilities of automatic contract review, global contract review, intelligent response to bids, similar contract recommendation, automatic analysis of terms and conditions and intelligent identification of risks, thus greatly improving the efficiency of contract management.
- Paradigm shift: The paradigm shift is mainly for IT deployment. For example, Huawei adopts a bi-model approach in which on-premises and cloud co-exist to gradually realise business cloud transformation and construct the company's unified data lake base.
Bai adds that Huawei Cloud aims to make the cloud ubiquitous, make intelligence omnipresent and build an intelligent world cloud base together. “Huawei's vision and mission is to bring the digital world to every person, every organisation and to build an intelligent world where everything is connected. Huawei Cloud really expects to help Africa re-prosper and rejuvenate through the technology, products and experience we have,” he says.
To learn more, log onto: www.huaweicloud.com or e-mail huaweicloudsa.com.
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