Home to younger, tech-savvy and rising middle-income consumers, Asia Pacific (APAC) presents a huge opportunity to start-ups. However, growth can be a challenge due to the stiff competition. Recognising this, Huawei Cloud offers its technologies, expertise and mentorship to startups through its Spark Program.
Cloud and startups are a “perfect match” as the cloud enables pay-per-use, agility and flexibility – all of which empower startups to experiment faster and at a lower cost – says Jacqueline Shi, president of Huawei Cloud's Global Marketing and Sales Service, at the Huawei Connect 2022 in Bangkok.
“Also, with the help of the cloud, startups can reach the global market more quickly,” she adds. This is exemplified by ReverseAds, a startup offering a keyword advertising platform that managed to expand its services from Thailand to Singapore and South America after joining Huawei’s Spark Program.
More than 120 startups have joined the Spark Program since its launch in 2019. The programme aims to enable 10,000 startups worldwide to accelerate growth with Huawei Cloud’s technologies and ecosystem over the next three years.
“Huawei Cloud will continue to invest in tech iteration and cloud innovation… to provide the most stable infrastructure and best platform for startups. Our work is to enable agile cloud adoption and fast innovation for them. We will fully leverage Huawei's enterprise market resources and industry portfolio, and coordinate premium resources such as investors and entrepreneurs. This way, we jointly build an ecosystem value network to empower startups,” says Shi.
Cloud helps leapfrog development
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“[Cloud can enable] enterprises to focus on business innovation and realise leapfrog development from traditional informatisation to digital and intelligent," says Ken Hu, rotating chairman of Huawei, at the same event.
The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University, for instance, took just one month to develop a new broad-spectrum antimicrobial drug by leveraging the Huawei Cloud Pangu Drug Molecule Model. Trained using the data of 1.7 billion drug-life molecules, the model can predict the physicochemical properties of drug compounds and score them based on their drug-likeness. Researchers can therefore conduct targeted experiments to verify drug compounds with the highest scores.
The Pangu Drug Molecule Model's molecular structure optimiser can also optimise the structure of lead compounds. This helps minimise the potential side effects of the new drugs on normal human cells. Thanks to the model, researchers reduced the project's research and development (R&D) costs by over 70% too.
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Enabling everything as a service
To help APAC organisations benefit from the cloud, Huawei Cloud is working towards making “everything as a service”, wherein the cloud is ubiquitous and intelligent. It is doing so by continuing to build its “one global network”, which provides networks that are secure, stable, and provide low latency.
“We are building more green data centres around the world…[including new Regions] in Indonesia and Ireland. We are expanding our global layout to bring more customers more premium services. By the end of this year, we will have 29 regions [including the local nodes in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand], and 75 availability zones, covering 170 countries and regions around the world,” says Zhang Ping’an, CEO of Huawei Cloud.
He believes those efforts will enable APAC organisations to use digital infrastructure capabilities in an easy, economical and environmentally friendly way. Instead of having to build their own data centre, organisations can deploy a digital infrastructure with one click in the future, similar to how we turn on a tap to get water.
Designed for cloud natives
“More and more enterprises are actively embracing cloud-native technologies to accelerate digital transformation. When they dive deeper into digital transformation, they [will] have higher requirements for application agility and data intelligence,” says Kevin Gao, president of the Public Cloud Business Department at Huawei Cloud.
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Kevin Gao announced that Huawei and CNCF are jointly establishing the Asia Pacific division of the Cloud Native Elite Club. Photo: Huawei
In response to this, Huawei Cloud has released two cloud-native products globally. The first is CCE Turbo, which is a cloud container engine that can speed up computing, network and scheduling to enable organisations to cope with traffic surges easily.
The second is Ubiquitous Cloud-Native Service (UCS). With UCS, organisations can centrally manage their cross-cloud, cross-region services with consistent experience in a cloud-native service deployment, management, and application ecosystem.
Additionally, Huawei Cloud has launched more than 15 new innovative cloud services. The services will help organisations accelerate AI development, data governance, digital content, and software development without investing heavily in general technology R&D.
Jacqueline Shi launched more than 15 new Huawei Cloud services for the global market, at the event in Bangkok. Photo: Huawei
To further help organisations fully extract the value of the cloud, Huawei Cloud is partnering with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to establish the Asia Pacific division of the Cloud Native Elite Club (CNEC). “[Through this move,] we hope cloud-native experts and elites can freely share knowledge and experience for joint innovation and win-win cooperation. We will also organise a variety of online and onsite salons in Asia Pacific [for everyone to share and connect],” says Gao.
Despite already offering more than 240 cloud services and aggregating over 38,000 partners worldwide, Huawei Cloud will continue developing solutions to enable “everything as a service”. The ease of using cloud infrastructure and services will further drive APAC organisations to make the cloud the backbone of their digital businesses that will help them thrive in the future.
Learn more about what Huawei is doing as a key contributor to APAC’s digital-first future, from the Huawei Connect 2022 Bangkok here.
