‘Cloud Technology Will Boost Future Businesses in Nigeria’

By Emma Okonji

Huawei has advised business owners in NIgeria to invest in cloud technology for business sustainability and continuity. The technology company also encouraged businesses to adopt hardware innovation, software re-architecture, and data intelligence, in order to boost future businesses.
The company gave the advice during its just concluded second Open Cloud Congress West Africa summit in Lagos, with the theme, ‘Transforming with Cloud: Setting New Benchmark’.
Huawei said by depending on joint innovation, technology innovation and cooperation innovation, it had devoted itself to build an open, collaborative and win-win cloud ecosystem together with customers and partners.
It also pledged to strengthen cooperative relationships with its customers, and seek greater market opportunities.
Huawei engaged industry leaders and Information Technology (IT) vendors on promoting more open, more efficient and more structured business growth for enterprise and carrier.
It used the forum to share its vision and ideas about the future, strategies on how to work together with various industries in order to advance Information and Communications Technology, and showcase its experiences in IT.
“In this digital era, users demands real-time, on-demand, all-online, and social experience. To adapt effectively, telecoms carriers and big business must change their business models, build ecosystems, add new infrastructure, develop organisations and processes, and learn new skills,” the company said.
According to the Chief Technical Officer of Huawei’s IT Data Centre Solution Sales, Ron Raffensperger, “Traditional industries find themselves under increasing pressure to transform and upgrade. IT has shifted from being a support system to a business and production system. The emergence of technologies represented by cloud computing is driving the need to change and reshape IT.”
He said: “In addition, the rise of Big Data is spawning additional cloud computing-based IT initiatives.
The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that cloud computing will be one of the IT megatrends in 2016. IT will shift from being a support service to a core production platform, as operators revitalise their closed, low-efficiency networks and shorten time-to-market, he said.
“Open, agile, cloud-based networks will give them the power to seize fast-moving market opportunities (digital and cloud services),” Raffensperger said.
He said as an IT industry leader, Huawei concentrated on IT infrastructure and continued to openly invest in and work with partners to provide innovative, differentiated and leading IT solutions for customers worldwide.
According to him, traditional industries need to transform and upgrade themselves.
“Innovative technologies such as Industry 4.0 connect everything, and Big Data analytics can be increasingly applied to industrial processes. This phenomenon drives traditional industries to transform, and redefines business models,” he said.
“As such, each enterprise across every industry is taking up a new starting place. The enterprise IT system is not just a support system, but is becoming a business and production system. Each enterprise is expected to fully leverage their IT system to enhance competitiveness, accelerate product Go-to-Market, increase operational efficiency, and reduce costs,” he added.
The Huawei CTO also said that the rise of cloud computing drove the need to reshape IT, adding that IT represented by cloud computing, brings about new changes and lay the groundwork for the digital restructure initiatives of traditional enterprises and IT staff.