Huawei’s move to provide enterprises with a one-stop public cloud and network service threatens operators

Huawei announced a major shift in its public cloud strategy at its analyst summit in April 2018. Huawei aspires to become a ‘top five’ global public cloud provider alongside Alibaba, AWS, Azure and Google, without relying on the cloud infrastructure that it had hoped to build with operator partners. Huawei expects to embed a host of smart services into its public cloud, including advanced SDN capabilities, to appeal to enterprises looking for a single ICT infrastructure provider. Huawei’s cloud networking capabilities could differentiate it from other public cloud providers and could allow Huawei to usurp operators’ roles in providing cloud connectivity.