Mar 04

Transforming Industries With The Cloud and New ICT

New ICT is the realization and convergence of information technology in the cloud era, also known as Cloud 2.0. Today’s cloud technologies promise the ability to communicate a vast amount of data, process it at light speed and securely store it around the globe.

New ICT is now permeating our daily lives through contactless payments including Virtual Teller Machines (VTMs), Smart Manufacturing, Smart Grids, Public Safety and Smart Cities. We can see various industries are either currently utilizing new ICT or are on their way to converting to it. To support this conversion, ICT companies like Huawei will become even more useful by providing the underlying hardware. Let’s take a closer look at how enterprises are using New ICT for their business transformation.

Disclosure: This is a sponsored article about New ICT.

Cloud Computing has been accelerating and reshaping industries

Media Cloud Transforms France’s TF1 Media Production Cycle

The shift towards using an omni-media production and broadcasting cloud platform is an upcoming trend and an area that the TV and radio media can invest in. In order to keep up in the omni-media era and the speed at which media is consumed, TV and radio media companies need to invest in an omni-media production and broadcasting cloud platform now more than ever.

TF1, the largest TV station in France constructed a private cloud IT platform, to support media-service-defined IT resource pooling, service automation, and intelligent management. The platform enables omni-media content production and broadcasting anytime and anywhere. TF1 built a converged news production platform that depends on the Huawei Media Cloud solution. Team members can now log in to the office Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) and editing VDI at the same time, thus achieving higher work efficiency and a better user experience.

This solution consists of two parts: a public cloud outside of the TV station and a private cloud for HD and video editing capabilities. The news center allows for quick scalability of new TV channels and programs using a cloud-based platform to integrate existing content resources. This improves access efficiency to share media data by 90% and journalists can use the cloud-based architecture to edit video anywhere. This change improves news production efficiency by 50%.

Railway Cloud: Helping Beijing’s Yan Fang line Fully Automated Driving Become A Reality

In traditional metro information systems architecture, data is relayed through independent specialized subsystems. The control of these subsystems is decentralized and mainly used for loop control for closed circuit monitoring. This reduces sharing efficiency and makes for a weak connection that cannot adapt to the data and intelligent linkage requirements of a fully automated driving system.

To meet the promise of a fully connected rail transit era in the future, Huawei would utilize big data, cloud computing, LTE, and other innovative ICT technologies. These technologies will help global metro customers achieve efficient, secure, and high quality services that will lead to a fully intelligent and automated urban rail transit system. This system is called The Cloud Traffic Control Integrated Automation System (TIAS) and uses Huawei cloud architecture technology to improve the utilization of hardware resources, save on power and space and reduce the overall cost of a transportation project.

China’s first fully automated driverless metro line, Beijing’s Yan Fang line, commenced debugging last year and is expected to be fully operational by 2017. The technology driving the Yan Fang line is the TIAS. Currently, fully automated driving technology is implemented in over 50 metro lines worldwide and has become the future for urban metro systems.

The International Union of Public Transport (UITP) estimates that by 2020 75% of new metro lines and 40% of existing lines will use automated driving technology.

Smart Cities

Smart city development is emerging as a major force to tackle challenges relating to rapid urbanization in cities across the world. Progressive cities are leveraging digital technology and intelligent design to facilitate sustainability and improve the quality of life for citizens. Recent years have seen the growth of Smart City development across the globe.

New ICT Transforming Healthcare in Kenya

New ICT facilitates distant healthcare solutions, enabling governments and hospitals in Kenya to deploy a pay-per-use model, and ensure the sustainability of healthcare services. Huawei’s distant healthcare solution supported the digital transformation of Lamu’s medical system, covering 28 healthcare facilities and benefiting 200,000 people. With more healthcare facilities gaining stable power grid and Internet connections, the solution can be extended and replicated, helping Lamu and other areas in Kenya overcome current medical challenges to provide affordable and convenient medical services to more citizens.

Dubai Saves Lighting Costs with IoT

There are approximately 304 million street lamps around the world, and the number is expected to reach 352 million by 2025. London has approximately 35,000 street lamps, resulting in an estimated total power consumption of 56,000,000 kWh per year. Impacting municipal expenses are inspection and maintenance of their street lamps.

In the Middle East, Dubai launched its connected city lighting solution in March 2016, the industry’s first IoT lighting system with intelligent control. It connects street lamps to the IoT and adopts a GIS-based management system, enabling cities to enhance the control and performance of every street lamp. The system provides municipal managers with status information on each lamp, in every street and enables precise control of on/off switches and brightness of individual street lamps, allowing on-demand lighting and a reduction in energy consumption by up to 80% over high-pressure sodium lamps.

With Huawei’s Connected City Lighting Solution, each street lamp is equipped with multi-level smart controls. Huawei has adopted 6LoWPAN technology, which has lower power consumption, and can automatically diagnose, network, and trouble-shoot problems, as well as enable better interaction with other smart devices.

IoT – Transforming the Business Model of Utilities in Nigeria

In 2014, the power generation volume in Nigeria reached approximately 20,000 MW. However, electricity supplies serve less than 50 percent of the total population (173 million in 2014), leaving half the population underserved.

Due to a combination of electricity theft and inefficient bill collection, power companies in Africa are faced with tight budgets, limiting their ability to invest in and improve their power infrastructure, some of which are over 20 years old.

Huawei and its partners have provided services for the electric power industry for over 20 years. Calling on these two plus decades of experience, the company developed an Automatic Metering Infrastructure (AMI) solution that is a powerful tool for power distribution companies to address the issues of inefficient billing, power theft, meter tampering, and confusing patterns of energy usage. This AMI solution consists of four layers: application layer, platform layer, network layer (transport layer plus access layer) and terminal layer.

SDN – Transforming China’s e-commerce Giant by Providing Scalability for Future Growth

Various data intensive technologies such as mobile services, cloud computing, social media, and big data are creating the need for scalable real-time network structures for an enhanced user experience. Some companies can adopt SDN without migrating their entire network by deploying a physical network with two logical networks.

Meituan.com is China’s largest e-commerce platform providing local life services for 130,000,000 active buyers annually, which equals 19.5% of the total number of Chinese netizens. Inside Meituan.com, there are over 1,600,000 business partners with turnover exceeding CNY 100,000,000,000 in 2015. The cloud powering Meituan.com is a public cloud platform developed by Meituan that transmits access traffic (500 Tbps/day) of more than 200 million online users. With the explosive growth of Meituan cloud services, it needed to scale-up its network.

However, traditional network structures cannot support large-scale computing resource pools or service automation. Therefore, the network has become the bottleneck in the development of the cloud. In 2015, Huawei helped meituan.com build a SDN-enabled cloud data center network. It not only guarantees fast service deployment and flexible resource scheduling, but also provides e-commerce and living services for netizens and scalability for future growth.

SDN is leading in emerging networking space technologies. It provides an agile open standards-based, centrally managed, and programmable network to support quick and seamless service operations.

Big Data – China Merchants Bank Mines Its Power

China Merchants Bank (CMB) has been blazing a trail in the use of new technologies to compete in an increasingly digital workplace where customer engagement is rapidly shifting online – and more frequently mobile. The number of online banking users in mainland China hit nearly 1 billion in 2014, according to the China Banking Association. CMB is the first commercial bank in China to establish a platform to analyze customer data.

CMB tapped Huawei to provide its Fusion Insight Big Data Solution. The big data teams from both companies worked together to customize the platform. With its big data analytics platform, CMB has pushed forward data-driven operations and decision making. The Big Data Platform has enabled the bank to deliver a variety of financial services applications for historical data queries, credit investigations, and customer forecasts for small and micro credit, contingent financial asset forecasts, and precise recommendations for financial products. According to the interview of China Merchants Bank in Computerworld Hong Kong, Ding Feng, director of Big Data Lab, CMB said: “The potential customer forecast for small and micro credit improves the conversion rate by 40 times.”

Moreover, the error rate of contingent financial asset forecasts is reduced by half. Effective purchase customers can be covered by less than 20% of the original amount of recommendation texts. The duration of credit investigations for credit card applications has gone down from two weeks to less than 10 minutes. Also, CMB’s online historical detail function is now able to support queries going back seven years, as compared to the one-year data queries that it was only able to do in the past.

Ubiquitous Mobile Broadband Empowers Public Safety

Worldwide urban areas have grown in population, with over five times more people in only 64 years. The risks facing modern cities range from security threats and natural disasters to small crimes. Having an adequate security infrastructure solution impacts public security.

For example, in Kenya police needed an emergency communications network with better features and advanced technologies to be able to support new services such as video and Big Data. The network would need to serve 41.8 million people in various areas of the country.

Safaricom, Kenyan’s leading mobile network carrier, partnered with Huawei to deploy a holistic solution. The solutions integrated a call-taking and dispatching system, eLTE broadband trunking, video surveillance, and intelligent analysis (license plate recognition and violation detection) to improve Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya’s two largest cities’, critical incident management and crisis management capabilities. With the upgrades, Kenyan police were able to conduct coordinated, three-dimensional operations at their headquarters, the command center and in police cars.

The solution was used to successfully manage Pope Francis’ visit to Kenya on November 26, 2015. Since its deployment and operation, the Safe City solution has drastically improved safety conditions in the country. According to an annual report from Kenyan police, crime has decreased by 46% in the areas covered by the Safe City solution.

Open Platform

Public safety has different agencies investing in building their own private facilities. These silo based systems are expensive and make cross-agency communication difficult. Data stays within the agency without consideration of open APIs, limiting their overall effectiveness.

ICT is becoming a core part of production systems. Companies like Huawei believe in platforms that feature openness; flexibility, elasticity and that create viable ecosystems. Many industries help to introduce New ICT that reshape their production processes and further transformation for everyone.

Win-Win Ecosystem

Huawei and Intel are collaborating to introduce solutions that enable smart buses and promote smart transportation in Dubai. Intel enables the solution with its X86 platform in Huawei’s IoT gateway designed for the smart bus. A multitude of smart services, including in-vehicle video surveillance, emergency services, communication, real-time health data analysis of the vehicle and multi-media services for passengers.

Huawei is creating an open ecosystem that offers a wide range of New ICT solutions for developers and partners worldwide, which enables them to develop enterprise-ready applications using tools and other support services. By providing a complete cloud offering across Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Huawei is helping enterprises transition to the cloud and provide them superior business innovation.

New ICT, Cloud 2.0 and communications technologies go to the very core of what Huawei is all about. It is how the leading communications networking hardware provider will continue to “grow the pie” for everyone in the industry. While many who cover the industry look to review the latest and greatest in mobile smartphone technology, Huawei has their sights on a much grander and comprehensive series of goals with industry leading cloud technologies.

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