Huawei says competing clouds should work like airlines: Chinese telecom Huawei believes there will ultimately be room for five major cloud infrastructure services in the world, and it intends to be part of that select group. Here's how rotating CEO Guo Ping described the vision during a keynote at the Huawei Connect 2017 event in Shanghai:
The cloud is a cornerstone of the intelligent world," he said. "Society is experiencing a tangible Matthew effect in digital technology development. Because of this, as well as economies of scale in investment, clouds around the world will begin to converge – becoming more and more centralized.
The company will build a global cloud network based on its own public clouds, as well as clouds that it has built together with partners. Guo likened Huawei's strategy to the three major airline alliances – SkyTeam, Star Alliance, and Oneworld – which take passengers wherever they need to go in the world. Huawei Cloud, he said, will open up the world to its users.
He went on to explain Huawei's business model for the cloud, emphasizing that Huawei will monetize technology and services, not data. He said, "Huawei's Cloud DNA is made of a unique combination of technology, security, services, and shared success."
POV: It's important to put Ping's remarks in the proper context, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "He's right that probably not more than three to five global clouds will remain, but they will interoperate anyway," Mueller says. Take for example the broad uptake of the container orchestration system Kubernetes, an open-source project that originated at Google.
"The truth is that the partner concept has so fair failed for cloud," Mueller adds. "It was tried by the telcos, it was tried by VMWare, and did not work. It doesn't that it may not work in the long run in some way or shape, but at the moment it's clear that the large IaaS vendors compete, and don't share, and the vendors who don't yet have a public offering and who could partner want to sell their own gear first."
Take the situation of a Huawei customer who could offload compute load to another partner, Mueller says: "That would be good for the partner but not good for Huawei." Finally, the airline analogy doesn't quite apply to a global cloud ecosystem as Huawei envisions. "The airline world was and is heavily regulated and has seen only regionally strong carriers," he says. "That's not the case with cloud."
HPE eyes AWS business with Cloud Technology Partners buy: After shuttering its own public cloud ambitions, HPE is looking to build a business through consulting services for leading public clouds, in particular Amazon Web Services, while making money selling kit and software for private clouds. Its goal was underscored this week with the acquisition of Cloud Technology Partners, a 200-person consultancy based in Boston.
CTP is one of only a relative few AWS Premier Consulting Partners in North America, and says it has completed hundreds of AWS projects for enterprises to date. Within that, CTP has found a niche consulting for financial services firms who want to move to AWS. It says it has built and migrated production applications for "dozens of the world's largest financial services firms."
While CTP is best known for its work with AWS, it presents itself as cloud neutral, offering services for Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and OpenStack environments.
POV: CTP will be moved under HPE's Nextpoint services division and it will benefit from greater scalability and resources. Although
While CTP is small in terms of headcount, it has ample experience working with Fortune 500 companies on complex cloud transformation projects. That kind of expertise can't be grown quickly, which is why HPE opened up its pocketbook for CTP.
The question ahead lies in how HPE communicates its intentions for CTP to its partners, many of which are also in the cloud transformation and services game and as such, may find themselves in competition with HPE for that business. Meanwhile, existing CTP customers and prospects will have to wait and see how well CTP's culture and track record is preserved as part of a much larger services organization.
WhatsApp unveils business version of messaging app: The hugely popular WhatsApp messaging service is rolling out a paid version aimed at businesses.
Purchased by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, since then WhatsApp has served as a hugely popular counterpart—particularly outside of the U.S.—to Facebook Messenger, but until now hasn't had a clear monetization plan under Facebook's ownership. The social network giant has rolled out business-friendly features for Messenger and now is taking similar steps with WhatsApp. Here's how WhatsApp describes the plan, from an official blog post:
We know businesses have many different needs. For example, they want an official presence – a verified profile so people can identify a business from another person – and an easier way to respond to messages. We're building and testing new tools via a free WhatsApp Business app for small companies and an enterprise solution for bigger companies operating at a large scale with a global base of customers, like airlines, e-commerce sites, and banks. These businesses will be able to use our solutions to provide customers with useful notifications like flight times, delivery confirmations, and other updates.
The business versions are now in testing; WhatsApp says its goal is to maintain a high level of responsiveness and service.
POV: WhatsApp recently started a closed pilot program for verifying business accounts. The company says messages between customers and businesses will be encrypted end-to-end, although if a business uses a service provider to manage their messages, the latter may be able to read the messages.
News of WhatsApp's plans actually leaked as far back as March, but they seem much further along at this stage. Overall, the emergence of Messenger and WhatsApp as communications channels between businesses and customers is something for every sales, marketing and support organization to have on their radar.
What obviously isn't new is the notion of using electronic messages to reach customers, given the longstanding prominence of email and SMS. But WhatsApp and Messenger can provide a more robust experience, and it's an opportunity that enterprises should be careful not to squander through a lack of discipline. There's no need for spam to rear its ugly head in the multimedia messaging world.