Huawei plans to offer public cloud service in China

Telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies plans to launch a public cloud service in China in July, amid growing competition from local and foreign players.

“We hope that once it launches, we can bring some surprises to all our enterprise customers,” said Eric Xu, Huawei’s acting CEO, on Tuesday at a company event for analysts.

Xu provided few details, but said Huawei aimed to offer a unique service. In China, other large tech players have already entered the public cloud space, including Microsoft and Amazon.com.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is currently the leading player, according to Forrester Research. And in March, it announced it would enter the U.S. cloud computing market.

Although Huawei is a global company, selling networking gear to mobile carriers worldwide, Xu said its upcoming cloud service would be limited to its home market, at least for now.

“In markets outside of China, our first priority is to work together with our telecom operators, and develop public cloud services,” he said. Xu is the acting CEO of Huawei until September under the company’s rotating CEO program.

Huawei may be coming late to the market, but it already supplies hardware and software products to clients wanting to run cloud services.

Xu doesn’t expect its upcoming service to conflict with China’s three telecom operators, which Huawei counts as customers for its networking gear. China’s three telecom operators aren’t major players in this space, and Huawei has already discussed the matter with the companies.

“Even if Huawei steps into this area, there would not be major competition,” he added. “If Huawei can be successful, maybe there is a possibility for partnerships.”