Hu Houkun said that the commercial deployment of 5G is still accelerating, and it takes time for revenue to form.
文 | Su Jianxun, Li Zhenliang
On September 18th, the 4th Huawei Connected Conference was held in Shanghai. This is the first time that Huawei has integrated enterprise BG, operator BG, and cloud BU into ICT organizations.
The “Full Connection Conference” is Huawei’s annual To B business training ground. Compared with the booming consumer business (represented by hardware sales such as mobile phones), Huawei’s enterprise-class business once faced a ceiling in growth in 2018, but still accounts for nearly half of Huawei’s overall revenue.
According to the semi-annual report disclosed by Huawei at the end of this year, the operator’s business revenue reached 146.5 billion yuan, accounting for 36.5%; the business income reached 31.6 billion yuan, accounting for 7.9%.
Hard technology based on chips, servers, cloud computing, and AI is still Huawei’s absolute technical barrier. At the conference, Huawei’s rotating chairman Hu Houkun also brought a hard-core technical product release, including the training cluster ATLAS 900 consisting of several thousand rising processors. Huawei claims that this is the fastest AI training cluster in the world.
In addition, Huawei released its overall computing strategy for the first time,The strategy includes four aspects: architecture innovation, investment in the entire scene processor family, and “doing something wrong” Business strategy. Hu Houkun revealed that Huawei will also launch a new fertile plan, which will invest 1.5 billion US dollars, with the goal of increasing the number of developers to 5 million.
Hu Houkun responded to the “Huawei is willing to sell 5G technology and patents” when he was interviewed by foreign media.
The proposal that Mr. Ren has recently made in an interview with the media is not a very complicated issue. Everyone knows that the 5G market is progressing very fast. There is a lot of controversy surrounding Huawei’s 5G supply. If we propose to achieve it, 5G will generate more competition from the global supply chain, which will definitely benefit users and promote the development of the industry. We are very willing to see this situation.
On the other hand, there are many doubts about Huawei’s 5G technology, as well as security issues, but Huawei believes that there is no basis, because you do not master this technology, if you master this technology in a commercial way, Developing on it helps reduce concerns about security.
For the development direction of Huawei’s 5G, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other technology trends, Huawei’s rotating chairman Hu Houkun, Huawei cloud business president Zheng Yelai, Huawei Cloud & AI products Vice President of Services Huang Wei After interviews, he was interviewed by Chinese and foreign media. The following is a partial interview:
Q: Recently, Ren Zhengfei said that he wants to package and sell 5G patents. What do you think about this?
Hu Houkun: To be honest, I feel a little surprised. All my attention this morning focused on the computing strategy. Ren’s recent proposal to be interviewed by the media is not a very complicated issue. Everyone knows that the 5G market is progressing very fast. There is a lot of controversy surrounding Huawei’s 5G supply. If we propose to achieve it, 5G will generate more competition from the global supply chain, which will definitely benefit users and promote the development of the industry. We are very willing to see this situation.
On the other hand, there are many doubts about Huawei’s 5G technology, as well as security issues, but Huawei believes that there is no basis, because you do not master this technology, if you master this technology in a commercial way, Developing on it helps reduce concerns about security.
From right to left: Huang Wei, Zheng Yelai, Hu Houkun. Filming: Su Jianxun.
Q: You mentioned the fine weather this morning. Huawei is based on the external environment and internal strategy, and released the overall computing strategy.
Hu Houkun: Around the calculation of this industry investment, it has begun more than a decade ago. Last year, Xiao Xu (Xu Zhijun) explained the AI full scene strategy to everyone, and this year’s thinking on the AI computing industry was systematically elaborated.
Forming Huawei’s computing strategy is a matter of course. From the strategy of Huawei, we must usher in the smart world in the future. The smart world of the future has two key technologies as the base, one for connectivity and one for computing. For the smart world, this is two fundamental technologies.
We definitely need to be a good company in terms of connectivity and computing.. Huawei’s own mission is to build the base of the digital world.
The entire computing industry has also evolved to a node, giving us such an opportunity. The calculation mode is changing, and statistics-based calculations and AI calculations will become mainstream. From the perspective of the industry, there are still great difficulties in providing such calculations, and the chips and architecture are still unable to meet the demand.
Huang Wei: AI calculations require a lot of computing power, and technology can’t meet such needs. Therefore, we also hope to meet the needs of customers through the innovation of the architecture and the ecological creation. The day after tomorrow, there will be an introduction to technological innovation that breaks through the limitations of the architecture. Technically, the next decade will be the golden decade of computing innovation.
Q: AI technology capabilities are developing rapidly, but the corresponding legal framework is far behind. Can you talk about whether Huawei has assigned some ethical guidelines to employees and partners?
Hu Houkun: Everyone is talking about technical ethics on many occasions. Specifically to AI, Huawei is in the full-stack model, Huawei is the bottom layer, Huawei will provide chip development, AI architecture open source, will not provide applications.
We must first ensure that the technology provided by Huawei is safe. We take a variety of innovative measures from technical security to ensure that our technology, including chips and solutions, is secure.
Secondly, Huawei wants to protect the user’s data, because a considerable part of the relevant data is designed to personal privacy, involving trade secrets. Everyone contributes all the data, and we will have this market. However, while contributing data, everyone definitely wants to be fully protected, so the better the protection, the more data, the better our intelligence will develop.
Finally, the top-level application of AI determines the purpose of AI. Although Huawei does not participate in the development of upper-layer applications, it will actively participate in such discussions.
Q: Since this year, we have seen several companies that have done ARM have closed down. Now only Huawei and another company are pushing. What is the progress of Huawei’s software ecology and application? In order to avoid risks, has Huawei considered adopting some other architecture CPUs instead of ARM?
Huang Wei: In 2018, ARM processor shipments were 23 billion, and there were only 30 million data center sides. This is a hundred times difference.
Each billion mobile phones are ARM-based every year, and millions of apps on mobile phones are based on the ARM ecosystem. The ecological advantages of ARM will gradually extend to the data center.
The previous ARM-based technology can’t be used in the data center. One core limitation is performance, and Huawei released this year.Peng 920 is ARM-compatible, multi-core, high concurrency, and incorporates four cores into one core, which outperforms the industry’s general-purpose CPU by 20%.
The current calculations allow simple calculations to be performed at the terminal, and complex calculations can be performed on the cloud. If you use the X86 architecture to calculate the task of the terminal on the cloud, the efficiency will be reduced by 40%, and if you use the ARM architecture, it will increase by 40%.
A game customer will share it tomorrow, using ARM in the cloud, with higher efficiency and lower energy consumption. Using multi-core and high-bandwidth applications in distributed storage, some high-performance computing, databases, native applications, and cloud services, the architecture will bring a better experience.
Hu Houkun: Customers have diverse needs. ARM architecture has its advantages in the new computing era. Huawei released ARM architecture products, which are based on customer needs, not for different reasons.
The success of a computing industry is not enough with a good architecture. To succeed in the computing industry, you must rely on a successful ecosystem.
We need to build a hard power based on Kuangpeng and Shengteng chips, and we also need to build an ecological soft power. For example, we talked about this in our business strategy this morning. We have some hardware, open source software, open source software, enabling development and application migration to accomplish this.
Q: What is your judgment on the 5G deployment, global business opportunities, and revenue? What is the situation in Asia? What if you want to release signals to the Indian market?
Hu Houkun: Now 5G progress is very good in Asia. In recent months, I have not been very concerned about 5G commercial contracts, because there are too many. If you remember correctly, there are already more than 50 commercial contracts.
The commercial deployment of 5G is in the acceleration period. It takes time to form the scale of revenue. It will be clearer in the middle of next year. The first batch of network deployment in China will come to an end.
India is a very important market for Huawei’s Asia-Pacific region. India is a big country with a relatively young age, which means great potential in the future.
If you have any expectations for the Indian government, simply put more continuous spectrum resources with higher efficiency and lower prices.
Q: You mentioned soft power, what advantage does Huawei have for the attractiveness of global developers? In the future, Google software will not be compatible, will it affect the global developers? how to respond?
Hu Houkun: will provide powerful development tools and computing support in conjunction with the public cloud. Huawei has another advantage, and there are many industries in contact. Huawei has a deep connection with To B customers.In the morning speech, Zheng Yelai also introduced that although Huawei is doing technology, it is ultimately a company that uses technology to help customers solve problems.
The first wave of digitalization focuses on the To C field. The next wave of intelligence is in the To B field, using digital technology to improve the level of each industry. Huawei’s entire ICT business is oriented to the To B market, and To B customers have deep connections that help to seize this wave of opportunities.
The sharing in the morning is to help customers solve real business problems, not technical issues, such as how to improve revenue, efficiency, and how to reduce efficiency and cost.
How to solve customer problems? The first depends on technology, the second depends on partners, we also use developers as partners, such as textiles, coal, and enhance our technology and developer tools according to their needs.
Today, the benefits of joining Huawei’s developers will be 1. The technology of contacting a large number of vertical communities; 2. Supporting tools through Huawei’s public cloud.
Zheng Yelai: Developers choose us to attribute to three questions: 1. Is there an ultimate price/performance ratio that allows customers to choose us; 2. All business logic is a value and benefit. The problem of distribution depends on how the value is distributed; Huawei Cloud provides a good business logic to achieve the most cost-effective and altruistic value distribution.
Cloud service is a closed loop for Huawei to use IT to form value. What do you pay for, what should you get, cloud service is still the original business, but change the business model to better communicate with customers.
Hu Zong said today that 1.4 million developers, Huawei Cloud has more than 1 million enterprise users, and 3 million enterprises and developers share the benefits of value chain in the form of Huawei cloud services. Huawei Cloud Services only provides an IT tool. Make a deal with the developer.
(The header image is provided by Huawei officially.)