Last week Huawei hosted its annual Eco Connect 2022 event at the Sandton Convention Centre, where the company detailed its plans for the South African ICT sector and in particular its objectives for local SMEs over the next three years.

To that end, Huawei has allocated R100 million for South African small-to-medium sized enterprises via its Cloud Spark programme, which will kick off with the launch of a third Huawei Cloud availability zone.

The company is specifically eyeing to assist 1 000 SMEs over the next three years with the Cloud Spark programme.

Speaking at the event, Jay Zhou (pictured above), MD of Huawei Cloud South Africa, explained that it will be leveraging its evolving hyperscaler status to push an Everything-as-a-Service approach.

Here it will be bringing together traditional cloud offerings such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Technology-as-a-Service and Expertise-as-a-Service. Key to this approach is thinking cloud-native, acting cloud-native, and applying an all-digital, all-cloud, AI-driven mindset, he emphasised.

Zhow also noted that Huawei will be leveraging its three availability zones to address latency in a significant way.

“Investment in traditional IT infrastructure has fallen, investment in cloud computing has grown 32% in South Africa. It’s that growth that has helped Huawei keep growing its availability zones (AZs) in South Africa. Having opened its first one in 2019, its third AZ will halve cloud latency to 20ms,” explained a press release following Eco Connect 2022, sent to Hypertext.

“We are going to build a smart ecosystem in South Africa for South Africa,” Zhou added.

With Huawei looking to intensify its investments and engagement locally over the coming years, it will be interesting to see how it will compete against the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure in the South African cloud space.