“Our business is changing, and our customers’ needs are changing. We need to enter these markets,” said Jeff Jiang, the head of Huawei‘s storage marketing. The Chinese ITC firm sells networking equipment to telcoms, and is now seeing a big opportunity to expand into the storage and server markets: enterprises are storing more and more data.
Huawei is not starting from scratch. Late last year the company announced that’s it’s buying Symantec’s 49 percent stake of Huawei Symantec, a joint venture that sold storage and security products out of Hong Kong. The deal was worth approximately $530 million, an investment big enough to establish a foothold in these segments.
Earlier this year Huawei added an additional 1,000 research and development staff to its storage products. In September, we can expect the company to reveal larger scale storage systems.
Jiang also notes that Huawei is heading in the direction of offering a public cloud, but is short on details. Huawei has already said it is researching technology to provide free cloud storage to its customers.
Mobile is yet another vertical in which the Chinese firm is expanding. T-Mobile’s newly announced myTouch and myTouch Q smartphones are both made by Huawei, two upcoming devices that will compete with Android phones by other carriers.
Beyond Huawei the mobile space is heady on mobile, with many telecoms looking to incorporate one storage service or another. Box and Dropbox have been forerunners in terms of partnering with the right telecoms for optimal distribution, while SugarSync is doing the same, landing a partnership with Samsung for pre-installation of its cloud app on the Galaxy S3.
