Huawei to Power More Agile Business Services in the Middle East

“Weaving the Future” of IT architecture, new addition to SDN-ready portfolio supports more intelligent and efficient business operations

Mobilk - With the Middle East heading further into a new digital industrial era, Huawei—a leading global ICT solutions provider—has unveiled an advancement to its much-acclaimed Agile Network solution helping local businesses and governments to achieve operational excellence through more agile service innovation. 

The Middle East launch forum was held at GITEX Technology Week under the theme of “Weaving the Future” and included keynotes from industry experts such as Mr. Liu Shao Wei, President of IP Solutions at Huawei Enterprise, Paul Black, Director of Telecoms and Media for Middle East, Turkey & Africa at IDC, as well as numerous channel partners and end-users in attendance. 

Since its global rollout in 2013, Huawei’s Agile Network has been deployed by over 200 partners in the fields of government, finance, healthcare, education and more. The latest unveiling of the Agile Controller—which forms part of the wider Huawei Agile Network solution—enables organizations to benefit from more orchestrated, real-time connections between their services and their IT network. 

“Over the last several years organizations across the Middle East have sought to overcome core business challenges posed by transformations in the wider ICT industry,” says Mark Wu, CTO of IP Solutions at Huawei. “With greater mobility in the workplace, the arrival of cloud computing and Big Data analytics, more prolific social networks, and the Internet of Things all placing huge demands on ICT systems, companies as well as governments are now quickly moving to future-proof their networks using solutions like the Agile Network.”

Huawei’s latest upgrade comes at a time when industry experts are anticipating the “Third Platform” of computing to define a new era of IT around the globe. The Third Platform of computing includes technologies such as cloud services, mobility, social business, and big data analytics, which collectively are set to dominate IT industry growth over the next 10 years. Global spending on Third Platform technologies is anticipated by IDC to rise by 15% in 2014 accounting for approximately 29% of all IT spending this year. 

It is further estimated that a third of leading businesses will be disrupted by Third Platform technologies as they seek to build deeper relationships with their customers, innovate around new products and services, and improve their own internal operations. According to a recent IDC study, this will require organizations to be more agile in order to improve WAN/network security, create better data-backup and recovery capabilities, as well as enhance the performance of applications on the network.   

“Cloud, social, big data and mobility are transforming the world of ICT innovation, and are also being aligned with today’s business requirements,” comments Black. “Organizations in the region need to adopt flexible and innovative solutions to stay ahead of the competition, which is why they need to look at creating a more agile approach to their business and network infrastructure.”

“Within the Middle East, Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) is being looked at as a particularly attractive standard that allows organizations to achieve such agility in their IT operations,” says Wu.  

Amongst the primary drivers for SDN adoption today is the need of businesses to support virtualization of IT applications, the ability to deliver new applications across the network, and increased speed for provisioning application workloads on the network. To that end, IDC has recently predicted that Software-Defined-Networking will grow from a market worth roughly $960 million in 2014 to more than $8 billion by 2018 . 

A New Wave in Enterprise Networking

Huawei’s own SDN-ready Agile Network solution brings to market a number of innovations to support businesses in this IT transformation. This includes satisfying new services requirements in the areas of mobile applications, cloud computing, social media, Big Data, and the Internet of Things—bringing significant benefits to enterprise customers. These benefits include reduced labor and more efficient operation & maintenance, faster service innovation, and an enhanced experience while on the network.

The new Agile Controller sits at the core of the four main building block of Huawei’s Agile Network solution—which includes the Agile Campus, Agile Branch, Agile Data Center, and Agile WAN. The Agile Controller empowers IT managers to dynamically allocate network and security resources through a centralized control system. In particular, the controller allows users to quickly adjust network-wide rights that relate to security and quality of service policies. Aside from centralized control, the focus on security is especially important in today’s IT landscape as the Agile Controller allows for single-point security protection to be easily transferred to network-wide protection.    

“Within the Middle East, Huawei’s Agile approach to network architecture puts a clear focus on services and the user experience instead of on equipment and connectivity—enabling enterprises to concentrate on their own business innovation and transformation,” adds Wu. 

Agile Network demos and all of Huawei’s latest solutions and products can be found at GITEX in the GULFCOMMS sector in Zabeel Hall, stand Z-E20.