Featured Article from Conferencing

Huawei's EMEA Growth in Videoconferencing Market Recognized

By Frank Griffin
Contributing Writer

Since its foundation in 1987, Huawei (News - Alert) has been developing customer-centric innovations in information and communications technology (ICT) that now includes an impressive portfolio. The company serves both consumers and organizations with mobile communications, computing devices and other consumer electronics, as well as the hardware and software telecoms, network operators and enterprises need. The solutions it provides are currently being used in more than 170 countries and regions, including the EMEA. And the EMEA region is where Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) gave Huawei the 2016 Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Award for Growth Excellence Leadership in videoconferencing.

The EMEA region covers a wide segment of economic strata, with Western Europe and the GCC in the Middle East enjoying some of the highest GDPs in the world. However, there are also countries in the EMEA that are still developing with some of the lowest GDPs in the world. But as a whole, it is a mature market when it comes to conferencing endpoints, which, according to Frost & Sullivan, grew at 9.9 percent in 2015.

As for Huawei, the growth it experienced in the EMEA was more than double, coming in at 22.3 percent. For the company, conferencing is a sub-segment of its enterprise branch which grew by 10.1 percent in terms of revenue and 23.8 percent in shipments. Huawei attributed this growth to organic initiatives, a state-of-the-art R&D facility and investments that have resulted in product launches with greater frequency, and a robust global channel partner ecosystem. This ecosystem is responsible for increasing the number of global channel partners to 8,000 and the solution partners to 350.

In addressing the importance of the partners, Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Vaishno Devi said, “Importantly, Huawei's well-structured partner strategy supports its vision of establishing a better-connected world. It has orchestrated a global channel ecosystem and fostered deep relations with distributors, value-added partners, global partners, carriers, and Tier II channel partners.”

Huawei is moving to an all-cloud environment to launch its cloud videoconferencing endpoints with a cloud multipoint control unit (MCU) to better address the current conferencing and collaborative environment. The company's TE10 and TE20 endpoint conferencing solutions integrate six functional models, including HD camera, codec, microphone, speaker, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and foldable brackets in a small form factor for small and medium-sized conference rooms. They both support integration with third-party cloud platforms as well as Huawei's eSpace Unified Communication (UC) platform, a fully cloud-enabled enterprise product that includes voice, video, voice mail, console, unified messaging, conferencing, directory, and presence.