Can Huawei's ecological layout win the future?

Huawei announced its ecological layout, and the future is full of challenges and unknowns. According to a report released by IDC, a global authoritative market research organization, China's ICT spending related to digital transformation exceeded US$310 billion, or about RMB 2.1 trillion. By 2021, China's digital economy will reach a scale of US$8.5 trillion, including both digital industrialization and industrial digitization.

Huawei's Ecosystem Layout: Can It Win the Future?

In the fourth year of the "Fertile Soil Plan", Huawei released an upgraded version ahead of schedule. On September 18, at the fourth Huawei Connect Conference, Huawei Vice Chairman Hu Houkun announced that the new "Fertile Soil Plan" will invest $1.5 billion to expand the number of developers to 5 million. This will be another major move by Huawei in building an ecosystem.

The Fertile Soil Project

In November 2015, at the first Huawei Developer Conference, Huawei announced that it would invest USD 1 billion over five years to implement the Fertile Soil Developer Enablement Plan (Fertile Soil Plan) to build a development enablement platform and joint innovation for developer partners.

According to the plan at the time, the US$1 billion investment was mainly used in five areas: an "Innovation Fund" to provide partners with in-kind support, development funding support, and technical expert support for their innovative joint solutions; "Development Support" to invest specifically in the construction of open platforms and remote laboratories to allow partners to focus on their business and develop efficiently; "Huawei Certification" to certify partners' open capabilities and solutions; "Talent Training" to provide partners with R&D, sales and delivery capability training; and a "Marketing Fund" for developer ecosystem expansion, innovative solution marketing activities and sales incentives.

After that, Huawei gradually opened up its CT products, cloud services, Tencent AI computing, Kunpeng computing capabilities, etc., and established 21 OpenLabs around the world to build a developer community, hold developer competitions and talent certification, etc. "In the past four years, the 'Fertile Soil Plan' has progressed very smoothly, and has developed more than 1.3 million developers and more than 14,000 ISVs (independent software developers)." Hu Houkun said.

The "Fertile Soil Plan 2.0" released this time includes seven aspects of content, including training and empowerment, fertile soil universities, Huawei certification, open laboratories, joint marketing, innovation funds, and fertile soil workshops. It optimizes the corresponding processes, communities, resource allocation, etc. for the four stages of the developer development process, namely understanding, learning, building, and listing, so that developers can grow more efficiently on the Huawei platform. At the same time, Huawei has set up three types of funds, namely LDF (Learning and Growth Fund), PDF (Product Development Fund), and MDF (Market Development Fund), focusing on the three stages of developer learning, product building, and product listing.

"In the next five years, Huawei's Fertile Soil Plan 2.0 will be upgraded in five major aspects," said Zhang Shunmao, CTO of Huawei Cloud & AI Products and Services. Specifically, it includes product upgrades, focusing on building an open source computing industry ecosystem based on Kunpeng + Ascend computing processors; empowerment upgrades, building a 360-degree all-round empowerment system; alliance upgrades, promoting the construction of industry standards, specifications, demonstration points, and technical certification systems to jointly expand the pie; community upgrades, building application ecosystems by industry and industrial ecosystems by region; incentive upgrades, so that every developer can obtain Kunpeng and Ascend computing power.

"We are facing a huge blue ocean in the computing industry." Hu Houkun cited data from Gartner to prove this point - it is estimated that by 2023, the scale of the computing industry will exceed 2 trillion US dollars, "Therefore, Huawei will unswervingly invest in the computing industry." Hu Houkun introduced that the layout will mainly focus on four aspects, including breakthroughs in architectural innovation, investment in full-scenario processor families, adherence to a business strategy of doing what it can and not doing what it cannot, and sparing no effort to build an open ecosystem.

"Today, the digital and intelligent transformation of all industries is in full swing, and the computing industry is booming. Huawei is firmly committed to the computing industry, starting with the most difficult architectural breakthroughs, developing its own processors, and using this as a basis to build an industry and an ecosystem," said Ken Hu.

In 2004, Huawei began to invest in the research and development of its first embedded processing chip. After 15 years and more than 20,000 engineers, it has formed a basic chip with "Kunpeng + Ascend" as the core, and released multiple series of processors, including the Kunpeng series that supports general computing, the Ascend series that supports AI, the Kirin series that supports smart terminals, and the Honghu series that supports smart screens.

The key to computing power supply lies in the performance of the processor. From the perspective of industrial development, it is necessary to seek breakthroughs in processor architecture and use new processor architecture to match the growth rate of computing power. Therefore, Huawei launched the Da Vinci architecture, which is the only processor architecture in the industry that can cover the entire "end, edge, and cloud" scenario so far, and is also a solid foundation for Huawei to build a computing industry.

"However, the success of a computing industry cannot rely solely on a good architecture. Architecture is only hardware and foundation. Real success must ultimately rely on a successful ecosystem." Hu Houkun believes that the success of the computing industry requires not only the hard power brought by the architecture, but also the soft power of an open ecosystem.

According to Hou Jinlong, President of Huawei Cloud & AI Products and Services, the ecosystem includes hardware ecosystem and software ecosystem. Huawei has taken measures to open up hardware and software respectively. At this Huawei All Connect Conference, Huawei officially launched its computing strategy based on the "Kunpeng + Ascend" dual engines. It announced the open source server operating system, GaussDB OLTP stand-alone database, and the open Kunpeng motherboard. Through hardware openness, software openness, and enabling partners, we will jointly explore the trillion-level computing industry blue ocean.

It was unimaginable for Huawei to release so many open source plans at a conference. A former Huawei employee who left a year ago told China News Weekly that Huawei did not do enough on open source in the early days and was criticized by the industry. With the development of globalization in recent years, Huawei has gradually realized the importance of openness. In 2010, Ren Zhengfei proposed that Huawei should not be a "black widow" and should be open, cooperative, and achieve win-win results, leaving more difficulties to itself and giving more benefits to others.

The black widow is a poisonous spider in Latin America. After mating, the female will eat the male to provide nutrition for the hatching larvae. In the early days of Huawei, the business was blindly expanding and the product line was too long. "After cooperating with other companies for one or two years, Huawei ate up or dumped these companies." Ren Zhengfei reminded at an internal meeting, "We must find a better cooperation model to achieve win-win results and be more open, both internally and externally."

This is actually a self-reflection of Huawei in its development stage. In the early days of Huawei's development, the direct sales model, which was mainly based on operator business, had a limited number of customers and a relatively single industry. All it needed to do was to provide good customer service. However, as Huawei shifted to enterprise business, it faced a wide range of industries and customer needs. With a long product line, its R&D capabilities would be stretched. It was particularly important to clarify the boundaries of expansion and to "do what it can and what it cannot do." Therefore, Huawei's Document No. 1 in 2012 repositioned Huawei's strategy as an ICT infrastructure provider.

This positioning continues to this day, and has also allowed Huawei to re-examine its relationship with corporate customers, laying the foundation for its subsequent ecological layout.

The Three Horsemen

In May 2015, Huawei released an action plan for the enterprise market - building a business-driven ICT infrastructure (BDII for short), which deeply integrates infrastructure, infrastructure and industry application software, enables a new industrial revolution through its own infrastructure innovation, joint innovation with partners and the creation of a user-centric ecosystem innovation.

This was seen as the beginning of Huawei's ecosystem construction. In August of the same year, the first Huawei China ISV Partner Summit was held in Suzhou, and cooperation incentives were granted to the first batch of ISV partners who invested in joint solutions. In January 2016, Huawei officially included ISV partners in the ecological partner system, released the first version of the ISV policy, and determined the tiered support policy. In September 2016, the SPP (Solution Partner Program) was officially released to provide solution partners with overall support from solution incubation to market sales.

In 2017, Huawei implemented a "3×3" ISV support system to help promote and implement solutions in three aspects: technology, marketing, and sales. In terms of technical support, the first China-exclusive OpenLab was established in Suzhou in March of that year, providing partners with a wealth of products and testing resources, reducing the solution incubation cycle by 30%. In terms of marketing support, efforts were made to promote online and offline joint marketing, especially the launch of the solution marketing platform MarketPlace in November of that year to help promote solutions globally. In terms of sales support, more attention was paid to the implementation of solutions.