After spending a week at Huawei’s first all-customer Connect 2016 conference in Shanghai, it’s hard not to come away impressed by both the Chinese technology juggernaut’s depth of innovation as well as its breadth of product offerings.
Huawei’s greatest strengths may lie in its telecom and consumer lines of business, but the focus and excitement at Connect was all about the enterprise. From its Cloud 2.0 strategy to ‘smart’ infrastructure for everything from airports to college campuses, Huawei has all the ingredients of a global technology powerhouse.
Except one: its inability to penetrate the US market.
Protectionism: Not the Whole Story
The US Government (among others) has long been worried that the Chinese government could use Huawei’s telco gear to spy on American companies and citizens. Given the frequency and persistence of cyberattacks on American interests originating in China, such a concern is reasonable on its surface.
In context, however, this concern is a weak one. Now that we know the US NSA compromised Cisco equipment and thus was likely using compromised network devices to spy on Americans for years, suspecting Huawei of allowing backdoors smacks of hypocrisy.
But the real reason to discount suspicions of Huawei’s potential duplicity is simply that it would be bad for business – and Huawei has shown by its actions that it is committed to growing its global presence with a relentless focus on meeting customers’ needs, regardless of any covert government interference.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/09/05/huawei-us-enterprise-strategy-hobbled-by-chinese-tunnel-vision/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Huawei covered Jason Bloomberg’s expenses at Huawei Connect, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
