Cloud Expo Asia 2024: Huawei Cloud Focuses on Data-AI Convergence

Cloud Expo Asia, the leading tech show in the APAC region, returned on 9–10th October 2024 for its 10th edition at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. This event brought together prominent cloud professionals, tech specialists, CXOs, startups, and developers for insightful discussions on the trends of cloud, AI, and other cutting-edge technologies, as well as future opportunities they present.

Tens of thousands of industry practitioners and exhibitors from Singapore and the APAC region attended Cloud Expo Asia 2024. Having attended Cloud Expo Asia every year since 2019, Huawei Cloud has been using this event as an important platform to showcase its latest technology and success stories to customers, partners, and the industry across the APAC region.

This year, at Cloud Expo Asia 2024, Huawei Cloud focused on the convergence between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data, and how it may help enterprises drive sustainable growth with data. Besides keynote speeches given by several speakers from Huawei Cloud, a number of impressive exhibition booths were also set up by Huawei Cloud.

Li Yibin, Vice President at Huawei Cloud MKT & Solution Sales in Singapore, received a delegation of VIP customers at the Huawei Cloud booth at the Cloud Expo Asia 2024 expo. While introducing the solutions on display, Li talked about Huawei Cloud’s impressive growth in Singapore.

“Over the past five years, Huawei Cloud has maintained rapid growth in Singapore. In 2023, Huawei Cloud’s revenue in Singapore grew by more than 100% year-on-year. Huawei Cloud has deployed five AZs in Singapore, serving over 1,000 enterprise customers from sectors like the government, e-banking, e-commerce, the Internet, and large local companies,” he said at Cloud Expo Asia 2024. “Huawei Cloud offers not only reliable cloud infrastructure, but also best-in-class AI and big data services, helping local companies accelerate innovation and intelligent transformation and expand their business.”

James Tan, Vice President at Huawei Cloud Solution Sales in APAC, gave a speech at the Cloud AI Horizon Keynote Theater in Cloud Expo Asia 2024. In the speech, he said: “With the rapid development of AI technology, the convergence between big data and AI has become a major trend. In the era of data-AI convergence, many enterprises face challenges like low efficiency in data mining, management, and use, as well as increasing data security risks.”

He added: “To help customers surmount these challenges, Huawei Cloud’s data-AI convergence platform offers a lakehouse solution and AI integration capabilities, supporting data lifecycle management, adoption of AI models of various sizes, and search solutions powered by enterprise knowledge bases. These capabilities help enterprises upgrade from logical data lakes to enterprise knowledge lakes that are specialised in unleashing the value of data. This platform has been verified with impressive results in many projects. At Huawei, leveraging a financial knowledge lake that integrates business data across various corporate processes, the Group Finance Mgmt Dept has been able to accurately identify contract risks and improve efficiency in decision-making.”

Tan also noted in his Cloud Expo Asia 2024 keynote a real-world use case right at the city-state, saying: “A leading renewable energy company in Singapore is using this data-AI convergence platform to process data from over 300 million IoT sensors. It has also developed its own predictive maintenance platform based on real operational data, significantly boosting equipment reliability, lowering the risk of equipment outages, and improving resource utilization. With powerful technology and service capabilities, Huawei Cloud stands ready to help enterprise customers from various industries unleash the value of data and achieve data-driven growth in the era of data-AI convergence.”

Kevin Li, CTO of Huawei Cloud Singapore, said in his speech at the Digital Transformation & Strategy forum of Cloud Expo Asia 2024: “Huawei Cloud is committed to working with the industry to build a solid cloud native infrastructure and continuously improve software and hardware capabilities as well as edge-device-cloud synergy to meet the diverse needs of different industries. Huawei Cloud has deployed AI in over 1,000 enterprise application scenarios. Working with customers and partners, we have developed over 20 industry-tailored AI models trained on curated industry datasets. Huawei Cloud’s distributed infrastructure and intelligent data and AI services will fuel innovation across a vast range of industries.”

Huawei Cloud at the Cloud Expo Asia 2024: Showcasing the Best in Cloud, Data, and AI

The main theme of the Huawei Cloud booth at Cloud Expo Asia 2024 was “Everything as a Service: Serving as the Cloud Foundation and Industry Enabler.” The complete Huawei Cloud offerings include KooVerse, the Huawei Cloud global infrastructure; Huawei Cloud Stack, a hybrid cloud solution; CloudPond, the edge cloud; and cloud services for AI, big data, and databases.

Huawei Cloud infrastructure

KooVerse is the brand name of Huawei Cloud’s global infrastructure of storage, compute, networking, and security resources. As of today, KooVerse consists of 93 AZs in 33 Regions and serves customers in more than 170 countries and territories. In Asia Pacific, Huawei Cloud is the leading cloud service provider in terms of coverage and network experience.

• In Singapore, Huawei Cloud has deployed 5 AZs, achieving no more than 44 ms latency for the entire APAC region.
• In Thailand, Huawei Cloud is the only cloud service provider offering three AZs, achieving 12 ms latency for the entire country.
• In Hong Kong, China, Huawei Cloud has deployed 4 AZs, achieving 9 ms latency for the local region, making Huawei Cloud the top choice for Chinese companies going global from Hong Kong.
• In Indonesia, Huawei Cloud has deployed 3 AZs, achieving 44 ms latency for the entire country.

For industries and organisations that have higher security standards, such as governments, large enterprises, finance, and telecom operators, Huawei Cloud offers Huawei Cloud Stack, a hybrid cloud solution that is also the first hybrid cloud to support AI foundation models. To ensure low latency, data security, and compliance, some customers may still prefer an on-premises cloud. This is where CloudPond comes in. As Huawei Cloud’s dedicated edge cloud solution featuring software-hardware synergy, CloudPond allows customers to deploy cloud services on-premises to process data where it is generated and stored, minimising latency and ensuring compliance in data processing.

Industry-Oriented AI Solutions and Cloud Services

Pangu Models 5.0, which were also showcased by Huawei Cloud Cloud Expo Asia 2024, offer a full series of models that are available in different sizes and can be quickly adapted to downstream tasks across a wide range of industries. Pangu Models 5.0 use a “5+N+X” three-layer architecture. L0 consists of five general foundation models—NLP, CV, multimodal, prediction, and scientific computing—which provide general skills to power endless possibilities of industry-specific applications.

L1 provides industry-tailored models developed by further training general foundation models on industry-specific datasets. L2 provides pre-trained models for specific industry scenarios and tasks. They can be quickly deployed off-the-shelf.

Last year, Hong Kong Observatory launched Huawei Cloud’s Pangu-Weather Model on its Earth Weather webpage, where visitors can now view 15-day forecasts on weather elements such as the wind direction, wind speed, temperature, and sea-level pressure.

Huawei Cloud GaussDB is an AI-native database powered by Pangu models. It is designed to enhance operational efficiency throughout the entire database lifecycle, from development to O&M. GaussDB excels in performance, availability, security, elasticity, and intelligence, and is easy to deploy and migrate to. It is now widely used in core systems in sectors such as finance, telecom, and government.

GaussDB offers real-time hybrid transactional & analytical processing (HTAP) capabilities and uses In-memory Column View (IMCV) to supercharge analytics processing. With a dual-cluster strong-consistency solution, customers can benefit from zero data loss and a 10-fold reduction in RTO. When it comes to security, GaussDB has received CC EAL4+ certification, the industry’s highest-level security certification.

In addition, GaussDB is highly compatible with Oracle and MySQL database syntax. It works with Huawei Cloud’s UGO and DRS services to automate data migration, reducing manual migration workload by over 90%. One telecom operator in Thailand has deployed Huawei Cloud GaussDB as part of its modernised IT platform, where all silos have been eliminated. This platform can meet the operator’s internal needs as well as the needs of its B2B services, with greatly reduced costs and higher efficiency.

With an integrated, cloud-based architecture, Huawei Cloud’s data-AI convergence solution is a combination of multiple products, including data lake, data warehouse, data governance center, and intelligent data insights. It offers customers automatic, intelligent processing of massive quantities of data and an outstanding experience where big data fully integrates with AI. Telkomsel, the largest telecom operator in Indonesia, has started to use Huawei Cloud’s big data solution to drive operational efficiencies.

Ecosystem Partners Are Essential to Huawei Cloud’s Success in APAC

At Cloud Expo Asia 2024, some Huawei Cloud partners also exhibited intelligent solutions and products powered by Huawei Cloud services.

• iFLYTEK, a leading AI company, exhibited its iFLYTEK Spark platform. This platform powers state-of-the-art AI writing assistants, AI art assistants, chatbots, and other AI applications. Pre-built AI agents allow customers to quickly build AI assistants that can handle complex tasks autonomously.
• Yonyou, China’s largest vendor of ERP software and systems, showcased an AI-enabled, cloud-based ERP solution for daily operations and business trip reimbursement scenarios. Currently, this solution is being used by 450+ customers in Asia Pacific.
• HiThink, a Huawei Cloud partner in finance, showed off its financial IT, financial data, and financial AI solutions powered by Huawei Cloud.
• AnyTech, a leading provider of next-gen credit card and digital lending solutions, put on show the core service operations platform AnyCaaS for an all-in-one card business, the intelligent financial model platform AnyFmass, and the one-stop consumer lending operations platform AnyCLaas. Another partner also exhibited an anti-fraud management system powered by cloud and AI technology.

Huawei Cloud is committed to continuing to serve the Asia-Pacific market with leading technology, accelerated innovation, and a robust ecosystem, empowering customers and partners, and driving digital and intelligent transformation in the region.