Last week we attended Huawei Connect conference in Shanghai which is turning into a massive event for Huawei with significant customer attendance. It was tons of fun to talk to customers, catch up with friends, and the different parts of Huawei while on the show floor. While there are ton of highlights from the show, here are a few highlights that peaked our interest.
- Huawei became the first vendor to offer an 802.11ax Access Point (AP). Sampling now and shipping in early 2018. We ran into quite a few engineers on the show floor that were very proud of being the first vendor to announce a product in this space and learned quite a bit beyond the spec sheet.
- Huawei customers are broad based and growing significantly. We ran into many large customers, especially from western Europe, that are looking to partner with Huawei beyond just point product purchases. In some cases, this was campus switching and WLAN, in others it was DC switching and campus. Huawei is doing a very good job of providing solutions and not just point products and customers are embracing it.
- 1% of customer spend. Huawei consistently highlighted that it was only targeting 1% of customer spend, leaving the other 99% to its partners. We found this interesting that as Huawei grows they are trying to assure their partner community that they will not go after the entire software and solution stack and instead focus on the pipes and compute. In areas of IoT they would integrate deeply with those partners, but the goal was to provide a complete selection directly to the customer.
There were a ton of other highlights, we are happy to discuss, if anything sparks your interest, let us know.