Saturday, June 23, 2012

Huawei has High Hopes in Managed Services

To Huawei Technologies, managed services is more than just a market segment, it’s an opportunity to accelerate sales and market share, and it wants a bigger share of that growing and lucrative market.


Around the world, Huawei is snapping up major managed services contracts with telecommunications companies and service providers. The foundation of these engagements is the technology has become too complicated for these companies to manage on their own. Outsourcing management and administration to Huawei frees the subscriber to focus on core business development and innovation.

Already, Huawei has more than 240 major managed services contracts in 60 countries. Most recently, Huawei capture contracts with Sunrise, Telefonica UK and SingTel. According to the China-based company, its managed services growth is 70 percent over the last six years.

The strategy and value proposition is essentially the same as Cisco’s Smart Net Total Care, which aims to provide Cisco and partner-led technology implementation and managed services support to telecom companies and service providers. Cisco is already generating more than $8.7 billion a year, and sees even greater room for expansion.


While many question the viability of managed services in the cloud era, companies like Cisco and Huawei are seeing tremendous opportunity in moving beyond offloading to true business augmentation. And they’re not the only ones. Numerous solution provider and systems integrators, such as Dimension Data are making similar moves.

Even though the Chinese company is one of the world’s largest equipment manufacturers, it remains mostly a fabrication provider to other tech vendors rather than a fulfillment company. It wants to break out of white box manufacturing model and become a true IT vendor on the global stage. Managed services on the service provider level is seen as an accelerator to that goal.

What Huawei lacks is a true managed services strategy to enable partners down the channel stack to deliver services to midmarket and SMB accounts. Cisco has been doing managed services enablement for years, providing MSPs access to its technology stack and granting price protection to MSPs that standardize on their equipment.

As Huawei dives deeper into managed services it may find the lure of the midmarket channel too tempting to resist, and could develop programs that enable others to provide managed services on its platform.

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