Ken Hu, Huawei's Rotating Chairman, kickstarted the first day of the Huawei Connect 2022 event, where he proclaimed, "Unleashing digital!" as a rallying point for attendees. This was Huawei's first Huawei Connect conference in Thailand, and this year's conference brought together over 10,000 ICT industry executives, experts, and partners from all over the world to discuss ways to better unleash digital productivity, promote the digital economy, and drive digital sustainability.

During his keynote speech, Ken outlined three main strategies for overcoming the digital revolution affecting any industry in the economy:

1. Digital Infrastructure
One of the biggest challenges for the region is to enhance and grow the digital environment. Specifically, Ken highlighted a few areas that need to be addressed as we look to overcome these challenges:

• Connectivity - Developing a network for the industrial IoT requires the ability to handle billions of connections. The networks must also be able to handle 10 times the existing bandwidth, latency on the order of microseconds, and industrial-strength dependability. Huawei is actively collaborating with industry partners to define, develop, and validate the 5.5G technology that will succeed 5G in both the fixed and wireless domains. The mission is to drastically increase network throughput, make 10 Gbps connections the norm across the board, and satisfy the needs of the manufacturing sector for stable, low-latency networks.

• Computing - The need for more and more processing power is rising exponentially. It is estimated that by 2030, general-purpose computing power will need to increase by a factor of 10, while Artificial Intelligence computing power would require a factor of 500. What a massive disparity! It is anticipated that a more robust digital infrastructure will be supported by an improved infrastructure for distributed computing, which will include improved coordination between the cloud, the edge, and the devices. Simply said, increased output and efficiency result from a focus on the system as a whole.

2. Cloud Environment
In this day and age, "cloud" is what every company buzzes about. We insistently have not even begun to touch the surface. Until 2025, Ken said, "95% of all new digital workloads will be delivered directly on the cloud." It's time to reframe cloud services from a mere utility to cutting-edge technologies that may be used for rapid innovation. Modern cloud solutions can offer the most advanced Technology-as-a-Service, Huawei for instance enables four pipelines: AI development, data governance, software development, and digital content.

In his opening keynote, Ken highlighted an extraordinary use-case in which a prominent hospital in Xi'an, China, leverages Huawei's pre-trained AI models to significantly accelerate the pharmaceutical R&D process. It used to take them two months to complete the same amount of work that now takes one month and costs up to 70% less.

3. Talents
The need of bolstering the talent pool to fuel digital transformation is often overlooked. In order to foster open cooperation and shared success throughout the ecosystem, Huawei is working on three areas, as Ken emphasised:

• Helping partners build digital portfolios – Huawei collaborates with regional ecosystem partners to map out comprehensive strategies for development and provide them with the know-how and tools they need to create their own solutions. All aspects of promotion, gross sales, and administration are bolstered in this way. When working collectively, "we grow together and succeed together," as Ken phrased it.

• Cultivating digital talent - Huawei has established a network of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) academies around Europe to train the region's students and workers in cutting-edge technological practices. Huawei has partnered with educational institutions and governments in 12 countries (including France and Germany) to educate approximately 4,000 individuals. It is expected that Huawei's ASEAN academy and Seeds for the Future initiative would train an additional 500,000 digital specialists in the Asia-Pacific region by 2026.

• Supporting SMEs – Commenting on this, Ken said Huawei offers several tools to assist SMEs in making efficient use of the cloud at reduced upfront investment. Over the course of three years, Huawei will help over 10,000 startups across the world by providing them with cost optimisation advice, technical assistance, management training, and access to go-to-market tools. And the key to all of this is to keep the cloud as simple as possible to allow SMEs to focus on their growth as a business.

Embracing Digitalisation Together

Digital transformation is progressively becoming an inevitable necessity. It would be a shame to waste the chance to make the digital landscape more accessible and help push the world toward a sustainable future.

Quoting Ken on his last words of the day, “We still have a lot of challenges ahead of us but if we work together, we can grow together. And together, we can grow stronger.”

Stay tuned for more exclusives from Huawei Connect 2022.