Huawei: OceanConnect IoT platform and solutions

Huawei offers cellular and NB-IoT network and device solutions to operators and enterprises respectively. The company is moving into the platform market with its connectivity management platform, OceanConnect, which helps to bring its overall ecosystem of partners together. However, Huawei has been slower to market than some of its smaller competitors and needs to gain a stronger position higher up the IoT stack.

This company profile provides:

• a company summary
• a financial analysis
• analysis of the company's strategic direction
• product summary
• an overview of significant customers
• analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

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Huawei is a global information and communications technology (ICT) solution provider offering hardware and software solutions and services more than 170 countries. Significant customers include BT, China Mobile, Singtel and Vodafone.

Huawei had about 80 000 employees involved in research and development activities in 2016, which is about 44% of its workforce. Its spend on R&D was equivalent to 15% of revenue in 2016.

Huawei offers its solutions and services to both telecoms operators and enterprises. For telecoms operators, Huawei has been prominent for its support of the 3GPP Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) technology. The company has invested in internal development as well as collaboration with standards bodies, customers, technology partners and developers to expand the ecosystem.

Huawei has released OceanConnect, a cloud-based IoT platform, which is offered to telecoms operators and enterprises to enable IoT deployments and to share network and device APIs with enterprises and developers.

Huawei released its Edge Computing solution (EC-IoT) for enterprises in 2015 to accelerate enterprises' digital transformation projects. The solution includes IoT gateways and a cloud controller for terminal management.

Figure 1: Huawei company facts