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Huawei Cloud doubled its Singapore business in 2023
Huawei Cloud grew its Singapore business by over 100% last year, with customers such as Ninja Van leveraging its services to run key workloads
Huawei Cloud grew its business in Singapore by over 100% in 2023, riding on the growth of the city-state as a regional business and technology hub for startups and enterprises.
Speaking at the recent Huawei Cloud Summit in Singapore, Mark Chen, president of global solution sales at Huawei Cloud, said key to the company’s growth in Singapore stems from its partnerships with customers that are embarking on their cloud transformation journey.
“We started our business small, but we’ve built trust with our customers over time, starting with migrating their non-critical applications, and now, critical applications, to Huawei Cloud,” he said.
One of those customers is Ninja Van, a Singapore-based regional logistics company with operations across six markets in Southeast Asia.
Ninja Van started containerising all its applications in 2016, and now uses Huawei Cloud’s Cloud Container Engine (CCE), a hosted Kubernetes service, across its infrastructure, from delivery systems and application programming interfaces to message queues and databases, according to Shaun Chong, its co-founder and chief technology officer.
“We always talk about the need to scale up in today’s cost-competitive world, and with razor-thin margins, we also need to scale down when business is not so good,” he said.
“Technologies like CCE containerisation allow us to adjust our infrastructure automatically without any human intervention.”
Serverless computing
Chong said Ninja Van, which also uses Google Cloud, runs a large pool of central processing units and storage in CCE clusters operated by a team of less than 10 people. He added that the company is now looking to leverage serverless computing through Huawei’s Cloud Container Instance serverless container engine, which can help to lower costs.
That Chinese cloud suppliers like Huawei Cloud are starting to attract customers to its platform services beyond infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is testament to the progress they have made to carve out a bigger slice of the region’s cloud computing market.
Besides sharpening its edge in AI, which company executives have said is key to cloud competition, another aspect of Huawei Cloud’s strategy is catering to different deployment models, including private and hybrid cloud.
Noting that the cloud transformation journey can be complex, Chen said customers often need to decide which workloads to keep on-premise or move to public cloud.
“Based on our customers’ requirements, Huawei Cloud has developed distributed cloud capabilities that include not only public cloud, but also private cloud and edge cloud,” he added.
These include the recent launch of Huawei Cloud Stack 8.3 in Singapore that enterprises can use to deploy the full suite of Huawei Cloud services in private cloud datacentres, enabling them to meet data privacy and data sovereignty requirements.
“It can provide not only virtual machines and compute services, but also databases, message queues, big data and artificial intelligence [AI] services as well,” said Chen. “In addition, all the industry-specific solutions that we’ve built on the public cloud can be deployed on Cloud Stack.”
Read more about cloud in APAC
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- AWS is investing an additional S$12bn in its cloud infrastructure in Singapore over the next four years to meet the growing demand for cloud services in the city-state.
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- Oracle CIO Jae Evans outlines the company’s approach to migrating its own infrastructure and applications to cloud and what customers can learn from its cloud journey.
According to Gartner, Amazon continued to lead the global IaaS market in 2023 with a 39% market share, followed by Microsoft (23%) and Google (8.2%). Alibaba and Huawei rounded up the top five, with market shares of 7.9% and 4.3%, respectively.
The research firm noted that generative AI (GenAI) is beginning to have an impact on the growth of cloud markets, although AI-driven growth in 2023 was small.
“Cloud is the foundational and scalable substrate required to make GenAI a reality,” said Sid Nag, vice-president analyst at Gartner.
“The segments that are beginning to see the impacts of GenAI include IaaS, where AI model training is consuming resources, and SaaS [software-as-a-service], where GenAI capabilities are beginning to be included,” he added.
