- Huawei has announced the launch of its Huawei Cloud Stack 8.3 offering now to customers on the African continent.
- The offering was announced at its Africa Connect 2024 in Johannesburg this week.
- Huawei Cloud 8.3 suite features over 110 cloud services, and may introduce Pangu models to the region.
In recent years a number of hyperscalers have made their presence known on the African continent, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud being the most notable.
Aiming to keep pace with its competitors, this week at its Africa Connect 2024 conference held in Johannesburg, Huawei Cloud Stack 8.3 has officially been announced for the region.
This latest announcement comes after Huawei implemented its cloud presence locally six years ago.
“Huawei Cloud has ramped up investments in Africa to support the continent’s development into an intelligent digital hub. The journey began in 2018, with the launch of Africa’s first public cloud region of Huawei Cloud in Johannesburg, South Africa. This was followed by a significant expansion in June, 2024, with the launch of Northern Africa’s first public cloud region of Huawei Cloud in Cairo, Egypt. Huawei Cloud has been recognised as one of the fastest-growing cloud providers in the world,” the company shared in a release with Hypertext.
Presenting the Huawei Cloud Stack 8.3 offering, Hu Yuhai (pictured above), explained that the breadth of services on offer within the suite are designed to make the company’s vision of industry intelligence more tangible.
“‘In Africa, For Africa’, we are ready to work alongside our customers and partners with better technologies, industry solutions, and ecosystem resources,” he noted.
Further unpacking some of the capabilities, Bai Yan, VP of Huawei Cloud for the Southern Africa Region, highlighted what was on offer.
“As industry customers drive forward with cloud adoption and intelligent transformation, they encountered certain challenges, such as unforeseen issues with submarine optical cables, inefficient methods of acquiring cloud resources, and concerns over data sovereignty,” he said during his keynote address.
“Huawei Cloud Stack helps them address these challenges with three strengths. It provides on-premised, reliable and secure cloud infrastructure, as well as offers an extensive suite of over 110 cloud services—unmatched in the industry—alongside a diversified partner ecosystem. All these are designed to help government and enterprise customers in Africa accelerate industry intelligence,” the VP continued.
As this is still a new offering to the region, it still remains to be seen precisely what will be made available to local cloud customers. For example, during his speech, Hu Yuhai highlighted the power of Huawei’s AI-powered Pangu models.
At the time of writing, these models are yet to be fully rolled out outside of China, but have been used in selected use cases, such as the Pangu weather model being deployed in Mauritius to better help fishermen in the region to prepare for any predicted weather events and ensuring they work in safer conditions.
For now, Huawei has yet to detail whether the Pangu models will also form part of the aforementioned Cloud Stack 8.3 services, but their application in industries like mining, media and entertainment, and energy certainly seems promising.
“With innovative technologies and a vast array of industry-specific solutions, Huawei Cloud Stack currently serves more than 5,500 government and enterprise customers around the world, leading multiple markets, such as the hybrid cloud markets in China and the emerging Asia-Pacific region,” Huawei outlined.
“Moving forward, Huawei Cloud will continue to spur innovation, expand industry know-how, and develop more customer-centric services to help more African customers move to, use, and manage the cloud better. Huawei Cloud looks forward to joining hands with more African customers to unlock new opportunities in industry intelligence and create an intelligent future,” it concluded.
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