Kathy Gibson reports from the virtual Huawei Connect – As the computer industry takes advantage of the power of 5G, it has the potential to drive real change through digitalisation.

This is the word from Guo Ping, rotating chairman of Huawei, who says the ICT sector is seeing incredible potential for growth, as more governments and enterprises go digital and embrace change.

“The digital economy is playing a key role in growth,” he explains. “Take China for example: the digital economy accounted for around one-third of China’s GDP, but two-thirds of its growth.”

Huawei believes that connectivity and computing are the foundation of the digital economy, with 5G playing a key role.

“Computing power will continue to increase as the price decrease,” Ping says. “And the value of a network is proportional to the number of nodes. The sheer number of connections multiplied by computing power will drive the digital economy.”

As connectivity and computing become further integrated to focus on real world scenarios, more organisations will benefit from ICT technologies, Ping says.

Huawei is building its solutions on five legs: connectivity, computing, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and industry applications.

“By producing synergies across these five domains, we look forward to the future with our partners,” says Ping.

Connectivity is the foundation of digital transformation, he says. “At present all industries are starting to incorporate digital transformation into their production systems. They all need better connectivity with service level assurances.

“Huawei is working on intelligent connectivity to deliver a hyper automated network.”

Computing needs to diversify to meet user demands, says Ping. “We know that different technologies like big data, AI and HPC have diverse computing needs, so a single computing architecture is no longer suitable.

“We have decoupled software from hardware to address different hardware platforms.”

Cloud has become established as the best platform for releasing the full value of computing power.

“We said our goal was to become one of the worlds five major clouds,” says Ping. “Over three years of persistent effort we have established 23 cloud regions worldwide.

“This doesn’t mean the cloud team can relax – indeed they will be under further pressure going forward,” he adds.

“We will also advance our hybrid cloud solutions to become a preferred partner.”

Over the last few years, AI technology has developed rapidly. “We have been exploring ways to better integrate AI into solutions, making the impossible possible,” Ping says. “AI can be deeply embedded into business systems to solve critical problems.”