Huawei: Reap the rewards while we're under-distributed
UK enterprise boss says Chinese vendor has the edge over rivals because of its pedigree in carrier and handset markets
UK resellers that work with Huawei now, while it is still under-distributed, will reap the benefits, the vendor's UK enterprise boss told CRN at its UK partner summit today.
Huawei's UK enterprise business grew 160 per cent in the first half of 2015, year on year, as the vendor focused on building up references in key verticals such as education and healthcare.
Founded in 1987, Huawei operated exclusively in the carrier space until 2010, when it launched a consumer arm focusing on smartphones, tablets and wearables and an enterprise arm providing end-to-end IT infrastructure solutions.
The Shenzhen-based firm, which is owned by 84,000 of its employees, drew 74 per cent of its $3.1bn (£2bn) global enterprise revenues last year via its channel, which encompasses 300 distributors, 6,000 resellers and 300 ISVs and solution partners. Huawei's total sales reached $46bn last year.
Talking to CRN, John Morrison, vice president of the UK Enterprise Business Group, advised partners to get on board with Huawei's mobility, connectivity and IoT portfolio while it's still early days. It currently has 150 UK resellers, working through distributors Exertis and Tech Data.
"You want to match your partner growth with your market growth," Morrison said. "Over the last year, we have seen significant growth, but right now I would say we are still under-distributed. Partners should gain a real benefit from being with us in the marketplace because our brand is growing, our customer base is growing and partners can take advantage of it."
Addressing the assembled UK partners, Morrison said the UK strategy is to snare marquee accounts that can act as references in the same or an adjacent vertical, or to broaden its footprint within that customer itself.
A good example of that would be the momentum Huawei built off the back of its initial campus-wide networking wins in education, he said.
"We widened that out with high-performance compute and storage within other education environments and then looked at health, which is a nice adjacent market to education as it has a similar campus environment and a similar shape and feel for requirements of data," Morrison said. "That is our strategy; to create markets for our partners to drive success."
He added: "We're not saying we want to do that alone; we want to do that with our partners."
Morrison also laid out Huawei's plans to invest further in partner training, marketing and in cutting lead times by investing further in European stockholding capabilities in Amsterdam.
He maintained tht Huawei, which ploughs more than 10 per cent of its global revenues into R&D each year - including $6bn last year - has an edge over its competition thanks to its pedigree in the carrier and consumer markets.
"The fact we build those carrier networks and those handsets gives us that insight and allows us to develop products that are more scalable and faster than the competition," he said.
"And we are increasing the investment [in line with] our growth, to accelerate the ability of the partner to deliver and grow the market, both in enablement, demand generation and efficiency, so partners can get out to market and really deliver against the competition."
Raymond Lau, Huawei's president of partners and alliances, said Huawei's partner sales are experiencing an annual growth rate that is more rapid than the overall number - 37 per cent as opposed to 27.3 per cent.
In 2014, there were 60 partners that generated revenues of over $5m for Huawei, he said, compared with 53 a year earlier. Some 130 generated between $2m-$5m, 194 between $1m-$2m and 337 between $0.5m-$1m (compared with 116, 106 and 254 in 2013, respectively).