Huawei UK CEO: Partners are crucial to our success

Networking vendor's UK CEO praises channel partners and reveals what is next for Huawei's channel

Huawei's UK CEO Gordon Luo praised partners as the networking vendor announced new goodies for its channel yesterday.

Speaking to CRN at its partner conference in London, Luo said partners are crucial for Huawei to establish itself in the market.

"We really need to leverage the local sales channels, and leverage the strength of our partners to amplify things bigger and bigger," he explained.

Huawei announced at the conference that it will be adding a demo programme promotion, a new partner app and a new reward scheme to its channel programme.

Luo (pictured) said: "The partners are very interested in the programme and also the way in which we will engage with more channels, showing them how working with Huawei is valuable."

The Chinese vendor was founded in 1987 and has been in the UK since 2001, with 15 offices and more than 1,100 employees.

Luo admitted that Huawei had branding issues when it started pushing into the EMEA market, and that its partners were the driving factor in its success.

"At the beginning everyone said 'what are Huawei doing in the enterprise market?' because we were unknown. But now we are working with our partners more and more, and I think that is establishing our ground in this market."

During the presentation Steven Harrison, senior network architect for western Europe, spoke about the future of the industry, saying he thinks that ICT organisations will be asked to do more operations for less cost.

"We need to address this as a long-term project. This isn't something that can be solved in the next quarter. We don't want to go for the short-term gain through aggressive growth in this quarter, we want to grow through our partnerships," he added.

"It's not about the products; nobody buys for the product anymore - it's about openness and selling together with our partners."