At its 2011 Huawei Analyst conference in Shanghai, Huawei proclaimed 2010 another banner year, citing approximately U.S.$28.5 billion in sales, 13 percent net profit and market acceptance in 130 countries worldwide.

Not content to rest on its laurels, however, the company outlined future plans via announcements concerning several areas:

• Enterprise markets: Taking clear aim at Cisco, Huawei announced its intention to extend its reach in the enterprise. Today, the company provides enterprise network equipment, unified communications applications, and call centers and services to utilities, governments, railroads and financial services. The expanded market unit will add cloud-based ICT services and solutions. This would include the typical data center assets such as resource virtualization, security (via its Symantec partnership) and distributed storage, all of which it plans to support via a non-blocking network.
• Consumer markets: Huawei is a bit late to the consumer device business, but it is clearly taking a page from the playbook of Taiwanese device superstar HTC by touting its own brand, whether in addition to—or in spite of—network operators. While the company already has some consumer products on store shelves, it now plans to offer smartphones, mobile Wi-Fi cards and dongles, home gateways, routers and set-top boxes, telepresence suites and more. Given the shift toward consumer recognition of device manufacturer names in the past several years, however, Huawei should have little difficulty adding one more product line to store shelves, even if the initial investment is onerous.
• Corporate reorganization: Huawei plans to create four separate business units for carrier, enterprise, consumer and other lines. While that works well for chart-ware, most industry practitioners know well the reality is not nearly as tidy. In fact, managers were slow to answer questions about cross-business-unit resource sharing, revenue splits, the role of services as a point of solution integration, etc., which force executives in competing companies to be too inwardly focused and slow to market. Huawei executives insist they won’t fall prey to those diseases, but there is little to back up their assertions at this time.
• Global cybersecurity: Huawei plans to establish a special unit to address security overall, but with an eye toward being seen as a trustworthy supplier and partner. Executives outlined Huawei’s extensive security testing in Europe with BT, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, Vodafone and France Telecom. The tests covered a multitude of domains, such as IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), femtocells, LTE-SAE, application servers, product life cycles and business continuity management. In all cases, Huawei passed the requisite tests and/or audits and was awarded either contracts or short-list vendor status.
• Single: As a rallying cry for its carrier network line, Huawei announced its Single strategy as the industry’s preferred architecture. The Single strategy articulates a three-layer network plan including core, metro and RAN/fiber access network (FAN). To be sure, it is an all-IP network with distributed computing resources supporting Huawei’s cloud plans. Notably absent, however, was any of the unsavory detail normally associated with the reality of today’s networks and their constant state of hybrid TDM-IP transport and multi-vendor character.

There’s no doubt about it: Huawei’s growth is impressive, and competitors are wise to watch their backs when it comes to this aggressive player, particularly as the walls of protectionism start to crumble. Huawei may yet become the team to beat.

At the same time Huawei copes with the chaos of growth, it is choosing to embark on a bold expansion strategy into tangential markets where it has much less expertise. For its competitors, these moves are both a threat and an opportunity. Competitors are advised to consider where Huawei’s youth may expose softness in its expansion strategy, the configurability of its software and its ability to help operators navigate the transition to all-IP networking.

    

          

编 辑：张丽    联系电话：010-67114335