Huawei taps Infosys to help its build cloud ecosystem

Huawei’s continued quest to be one of the world’s largest cloud players took a small step forward with the announcement of a new partnership with Infosys.

Huawei Cloud has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with India-based IT firm Infosys in order to help enterprises transition to the digital cloud. As part of the MOU, Infosys will join the Huawei Cloud Partner Network (HCPN) in order to better blend Infosys’ products with Huawei Cloud’s offerings.

“Combining Huawei Cloud’s product innovation and Infosys’ strengths in next-generation digital services, we will help our clients accelerate their transition to the cloud,” said Infosys President Ravi Kumar, in a prepared statement. “As part of this engagement, we will provide a suite of technologies hosted on Huawei Cloud, such as workload migration solutions including SAP and other enterprise workloads.”

Over the past several years, Huawei has made a determined effort to become one of the world’s largest cloud providers, but it faces stiff competition from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Closer to home, Huawei also competes with China-based Alibaba. Alibaba has been making a concerted effort to expand its cloud business into Europe.

According to a February report by Synergy Research Group, Amazon Web Services increased its market share at the end of last year to the point where it is equivalent in size to the next four competitors combined. In order, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba held the top spots after AWS, according to Synergy Research Group.

While Huawei wasn’t mentioned among the top cloud providers in the report, it has been trying to build a cloud ecosystem since at least 2016 when it first launched its “All Cloud” strategy for ICT infrastructure. A year later, Huawei announced it was seeking cloud computing partners to become the world’s fifth largest cloud provider behind AWS, Azure, Google and Alibaba.

Given its size, Huawei Cloud may be able to muscle its way into cloud markets that are currently underserved by the top four companies, but there are also a host of medium and regional cloud companies.

In this week’s first quarter earnings report, which was the company’s first, Huawei touted the artificial intelligence capabilities that are in Huawei Cloud.

“Huawei CLOUD remains committed to innovation. It aims to build the best possible hybrid cloud, provide full-stack AI solutions for intelligent industries, and make inclusive AI a reality,” the company said in its earnings report. “More than one million enterprise users and developers have chosen to work with Huawei Cloud. In Q1, Huawei Cloud services were launched in Singapore, and Huawei Cloud released its AI model market.”

In yesterday’s press release, Huawei said the number of HCPN partners had exceeded 6,000. Working with those partners, Huawei Cloud has added 2,800 applications that are available in 23 regions around the world.