Executive Interview: Jane Li, COO of Huawei

Huawei will demonstrate the world's first agile switch, the S12700 with its innovative clustering, IP service quality management and build-in AC technologies, along with CloudEngine 12800, the world's largest data center switch by capacity at Interop. The company’s products and solutions have been deployed in over 140 countries, serving more than one third of the world's population. Droid Report recently interviewed COO, Jane Li of Huawei about her current role at the company, mobility, cloud and discussed industry insights.

Jane Li, COO of Huawei Enterprise USA

Droid Report: Hello Jane, could you tell us more about your initiatives?

Jane Li: To understand our initiatives, you have to understand what is going on in our industry. We are very much seeing the convergence and merger of traditional Information Technologies (e.g. client server, mainframe) with Communication Technologies (digital comms, mobile comms and Mobile Broadband). This convergence is being driven by three key trends: The adoption and use of cloud models, whether that be private, public or hybrid models, The explosion of mobility in almost too many verticals to mention, such as education, retail, finance and public sector, and The consumerization of IT, wherein technologies previously seen in the consumer base are migrating to the enterprise.

As we span the ICT worlds of Carrier, Enterprise and Consumer Device, Huawei is best positioned to help our Enterprise customers navigate these critical transitions. Our initiatives across all business groups include: Enabling our customers to build stable, secure, next-generation-ready networks that support business agility and new business models, Allowing customers to take advantage of evolving cloud models, Big Data and all the promise these advances hold, Being a leader to help drive technology innovation across the industry and vertical markets, and working with top partners to deliver best-value solutions for our customers. 

Droid Report: How do you view business today?

Jane Li: Two words summarize it: “resilient and growing”. I think our customers recognize how our experience differentiates Huawei from competitors. Recent evidence is in the economic downturn of 2008 to 2013, when we saw many competitors suffer severe revenue declines. Our overall revenues, however, grew from $12.6B to $39.6B in that time with no inter-year decrease. This increase was fueled by our investment in R&D, which resulted in a broad portfolio, wide market reach and most importantly, our trusted long-term customer relationships. In uncertain times, customers rely on partners they know they can trust. Three years ago we created internal infrastructures and operations to support our Enterprise and Consumer businesses to allow them to grow.  

Droid Report: Could you share insight on how you see future growth?

Jane Li: Huawei recognizes huge growth potential in key areas such as SDN, BYOD, the path to 40 and then 100 gigabit in the campus, as well as the growth of video traffic as a huge component of the internet. But we know that we need to actively drive the future and not passively watch it arrive. Consequently, we have: Membership in 150 international standards organizations such as IEEE, IETF, DMTF, Continua, and HL7, 180+ positions in international standards organizations and over 23,000 standards-related manuscripts. Additionally, at the end of 2013, Huawei held over 36,500 granted patents globally.

Droid Report: How do you see Huawei leading in mobile wireless networks?

As with ICT overall, Hauwei is one of the few vendors that can compete in many areas of the mobile wireless market. In telecom, we are the global leader in 4G LTE, having deployed 111 of the 240 LTE networks in the world. As the No. 3 smartphone maker in the world, we provide smartphones, tablets and Wi-Fi devices enable end-users to connect to mobile broadband. We also provide both Wireless LAN and eLTE solutions for enterprises. Together, these solutions and our continuous innovation in wireless networks gives us an end-to-end knowledge that few competitors can match.

Droid Report: How do you see organizations further evolving with mobile and wireless networking? 

Jane Li: Enterprises and organizations must adjust to the new reality of a larger portion of their workforce being mobile (already > 60 percent in some countries) and a larger percentage of that workforce wanting to use a device they provide themselves. This is a two-sided coin: on one side, opportunity exists if the worker base is more motivated and efficient; on the other, security and manageability issues can threaten the gains if not addressed and controlled proactively.

Droid Report: Is there anything else you feel the Android market should know?

Jane Li: We are committed to the mobile market, of which Android is a key platform. We recently ranked as the third largest smartphone vendor in the world (captured 4.9 percent market share in 2013 with smartphone shipments of 48.8 million units, up from 4 percent in 2012, according to IDC) and plan to continue to aggressively compete by increasing our brand awareness and introducing more devices into the marketplace across all price ranges.

Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Through our dedication to customer-centric innovation and strong partnerships, we have established end-to-end advantages in telecom networks, devices and cloud computing. We are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers by providing competitive solutions and services.

We would like to thank Jane Li for taking the time for this discussion and Huawei.