Huawei India joins Redington to expand reach

Last year, Huawei’s enterprise business, reporting a 47 per cent year on year growth, contributed $5.9 billion to the company’s $75 billion-plus turnover. 

Signing the MoU here, Derek Hao, President, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei India gave an overview of the global operations. Huawei is upbeat about India given the emphasis on ‘Smart City’ projects and initiatives that focus on IoT and Big Data. 

It is currently working towards finalising a few projects that will enable it to scale up its enterprise solutions business in the country. The partnership with Redington is its second one in the distribution segment as it realises the importance of having the right support to execute its plans. 

He mentioned that its key clients included Infosys, where Huawei solutions were powering the flagship product ‘Finacle’ and it is assuring stable and reliable solutions. With wider coverage of branches and ATM penetration in the country, the Chinese company is looking at distributors network to propel its growth. It has a tie up with BrightStar.

Redington will support Huawei in developing resellers to market and promote products and services products in areas of server, storage, data centre and cloud computing to Huawei enterprise customers in the country. Currently, Huawei has over 500 tier II resellers.

Johnson George, Redington (India) Sr GM and Head – SBU (Enterprise, Server and Storage), said the alliance worked more on a project-driven basis. The advantage of the association is this makes it possible for providing affordable solutions with a well-established brand. 

“Huawei is a class brand and this tie-up will help us as an Indian entity to cater to class C and D towns. That is where we can teach the people, help them understand technology by skilling, training and certifying them,” he said, adding the conscious focus was to target tier III cities.

To a question, he said, the cost of their solutions would be 20 to 30 per cent cheaper over competition from players such as Cisco. However, he was quick to add that it was not the right comparison given that Cisco is a network-led company whereas Huawei is a storage driven enterprise. “From a network perspective, our solutions will be cheaper,” he said.

George also said they were targeting deals that would generate $15 to $20 million in the initial stage.