Operations Transformation Forum 2016 Held in Wuzhen, China

[Wuzhen, China, November 2nd, 2016] The three-day Operations Transformation Forum 2016 (OTF) opened today in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, China. The forum brings together over 600 thought leaders and technology experts from global operators, standards organizations, media and analyst firms, and Huawei partners.

Themed as ‘Transforming towards Digital Business’, the forum allows attendees to explore and share insights into the digital journey of the telecom industry from three perspectives: digital business, experience-driven operations transformation, and infrastructure transformation.

Dr. Howard Liang, Huawei Senior Vice President and Chairman of the Open ROADS Community gave a welcome speech at the Operations Transformation Forum 2016

Recently, Huawei and IDC jointly launched a global survey on operators’ digital transformation. The survey covered global operators that are at different stages of digital transformation. Only 8% of the operators surveyed believe that they have completed their digital transformation, while 74% have started to transform or are exploring approaches to transformation, realizing that many urgent issues need to be resolved. This forum provides an open platform for the industry to share insights and best practices of digital transformation.

At the forum, Huawei elaborated on its concepts and practices regarding operator transformation. Dr. Howard Liang, Huawei Senior Vice President and Chairman of the Open ROADS Community, shared three accomplishments and findings on digital transformation made by Huawei over the past year.

Firstly, Huawei launched the Open ROADS Community, aiming to leverage the power of the industry to identify and resolve common digital transformation issues, through an open and collaborative approach. Secondly, Huawei has carried out in-depth cooperation with HKT’s ‘Project Earth’, a true life project on ROADS experience-driven operations and infrastructure transformation.

Thirdly, Huawei has set the ROADS experience as the driving force for its internal operations transformation. We integrate the ROADS experience requirements of five types of users (i.e., operators, consumers, employees, partners, and suppliers) into the transformation of our operating processes and IT platforms. The goal is to make it easier, more efficient, and more secure for customers to do business with Huawei, make operations more agile and intelligent, deliver the ROADS experience, shorten time-to-market, and improve efficiency.

During the opening day at OTF, Jim Lu, President of Huawei’s Global Technical Service Department, put forward the concept of ‘change starts with us to better support you.’ Mr. Lu believes that digital transformation must start at home, “We need to first change ourselves with digital technology in R&D, delivery, supply chain, and other domains. Following that, we must draw on our experience, to work with customers to address the challenges arising from transformation, and ultimately achieve the business goals of reducing operating costs and continuously increasing revenue.”

Huawei will continue to increase investments in building IT system integration capabilities, to resolve business barriers during the operator’s transformation.

Zhang Ping’an, Member of the Board and President of Huawei Carrier Software Business Unit, provided specific solutions from the perspective of hands-on practices. Huawei encourages operators to adopt the latest digital technology to build a new digital operating platform and carry out thorough digital transformation.

The new platform should feature speed, scale, simplicity, and be smart. Such a platform must be able to support the ROADS experience, be open and agile, have strong analytics capabilities, and adopt cloud architecture. It must also help operators to pursue analytics excellence, provide flexible architecture, build the ecosystem, and facilitate agile innovation.

To achieve these goals, Huawei built a cloud-based solution, ’Telco OS as a Service’, a digital operations enablement system and, conjointly with the industry, built DM - a digital maturity assessment model, to help operators measure their state of readiness, capability to execute, and the outcomes of their digital transformation strategies.

To further showcase its extensive research and practices pertaining to operator digital transformation, Huawei has worked with over 20 industry partners, demonstrating our joint cooperation and collaboration on innovation initiatives in the areas of video, Internet-of-Things (IoT), cloud services and digital operations, through interactions and scenario-specific real life experiences. Focusing on the topic of operations transformation, the four exhibition areas will cover customer experience management, digital services, digital operations and ICT infrastructure transformation, through on-site simulations of real-world services.

Operations Transformation Forum 2016 is a large industry gathering that covers the entire industry ecosystem and brings together the industry’s top experts and best ideas. Leading operators will share their thoughts and digital strategies about transformation, their differentiated competitive advantages, and best practices in operations transformation. In addition, partners, standards organizations and analysts will share their insights and exchange ideas about transformation and ecosystem development.

Transformation that focuses on the ROADS experience requires the support of agile and automated operations systems, aligned development of network infrastructure, and a firm determination from the management team. Huawei will continue to team up with operators to embrace transformation and move towards digital business.