Huawei, through its Nigerian arm, on Tuesday, December 10, organised the Huawei Cloud Summit Nigeria 2024 where it officially launched its local cloud offering. The solution comes with a tier 3+ uptime standard, 99.99% intensity, and compliance with the regulations of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
“With disruptive technology, we can transform ourselves, our daily lives, our industries, our economy,” Chris Lu, CEO of Huawei Nigeria said in his opening speech during the launch.
Explaining why Huawei decided to build a local cloud in Nigeria, Lu said trust for reliability and speed is the reason the global tech company is localising cloud services. “We can provide much better services, much better latency to our customers in Nigeria. We are committed to accelerating the prosperity of Nigeria,” the CEO said.
Represented by the Acting Director, Regulations and Compliance, NITDA, Barrister Emmanuel Edet, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, Director-General, NITDA, in his speech said, “Nigeria has huge potential for cloud infrastructure, thus gives the country a boost for cloud infrastructure investment.”
In his speech, Dr Obafemi Hamzat, Deputy Governor, Lagos, said “Huawei building a cloud in Nigeria is a big deal because of data sovereignty and help Nigeria compete on a global scale. So, the theme of the summit speaks to our shared interest in embracing digital transformation.”
The Deputy Governor explained that businesses need to look at technology like cloud computing, as it holds the key to unlocking transformational systems across the board.
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In officially launching the local cloud, Roc Bai, Vice President, of Cloud sub-Saharan African Region said the Nigerian government supports cloud computing and digital transformation.
“We will provide local cover to ensure data sovereignty,” Bai said, using a number, 00.15 seconds, to describe the expected speed of the Huawei cloud.
Continuing in his speech, Bai announced the availability of Huawei Cloud Stack in Nigeria.
Huawei Cloud Stack is a hybrid cloud solution that can be used to manage physically distributed, logically unified resources. It is a trusted on-premises cloud solution that improves security and compliance.
It offers more than 70 cloud services covering 10 categories. Huawei Cloud Stack can also be used to build large-scale central cloud platforms for governments and enterprises or transform legacy application systems using a distributed or microservices-based architecture.
“This comes with AI abilities. You’re also sure of security and stability,” Bai said.
The Vice President also announced the availability of Huawei Pangu, a series of large-scale AI models developed and trained by the Chinese company using its computing framework, MindSpore, and its custom AI chips, Ascend.
The models cover various domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, multi-modal, and scientific computing. Some of the models, such as Pangu-Weather and Pangu-α, are available as cloud services on Huawei Cloud.
Hugo Hu, MD, Huawei Cloud Nigeria said: “In the past three years, revenue has grown 20x and now have 50+ partners.“
One of such, Yinka Daramola, CEO of Qucoon Limited, said, “When you work with Huawei, you become a global partner.”
Another partner, Global Accelerex Limited, represented by the CIO, Oziegbe Oseghale said the company’s “130,000+ businesses trust us” because “in moving to Huawei, we have been able to overcome some challenges,” especially cost optimisation.
Talking about the future, the next five years of the company’s local cloud in Nigeria, Hugo Hu says the company plans to service 1000 customers, have 100 partners, and work with 5000 developers.
Ending the summit, Osita Iweze, Deputy MD, Huawei Nigeria says the company has trained over 70,000 digital talents in Nigeria and will continue to provide innovative solutions, especially with the launch of the local cloud.
