Keeping in mind its global approach to create unique value for its customers, Huawei is aggressively focusing towards expanding its channel base for media and entertainment segment in India. The company is targeting the broadcast media and entertainment domain with its innovative storage products and solutions.
On the sidelines of the recently concluded BES Expo, Goober Gaowei, Head Solutions Vertical, Huawei Enterprise India talks with Zia Askari from www.ChannelDrive.in on the company’s channel strategy to target India and how Huawei’s solutions are bringing in world class innovation and unique value for its customers in India.
What is the core focus of Huawei as far as media sector is concerned?
As a continuously evolving segment, broadcast media as a domain needs solutions that are highly innovative and are based on “converged, agile, open” system architecture. This is one of our core focus in this segment and we are enabling customers to set up system architecture governed by the concept of “strategy-driven business, service-defined IT” which results in businesses becoming more streamlined and agile.
Huawei is focusing on strengthening cooperation with its partners within India and throughout the south-east Asian media industry, in the effort to cater to the diversified IT requirements of customers across geographies and deliver high-quality solutions.
As part of our global deployments, Hong Kong based Phonix TV is using Huawei media solutions and we set up the first global media cloud as part of this implementation. We showcased this to our potential customers here in BES and we have received great response.
We are also focusing on our IT infrastructure for our media and entertainment customers. Together with our set of partners, we can provide customers solution for editing, film post production, and printing segment and media asset management system. All this can be provided as part of Huawei Media Solutions.
For all these solutions in the media space, what is the ‘go to market’ strategy that Huawei has for the Indian market?
We work with partners because customers not only need hardware but they need a reliable solution. Right now we have our focus on three region and in each region we have one partner for media segment. But this year, we are planning to increase our partner base to have 10 more partners dedicated towards the media segment. These partners can be software providers or system integrators we want to work together with them.
As of now we have three partners in the form of Team Computers and CMS Computers and Technobind. We want to participate in this ecosystem in India, much more rigorously and provide end to end cost effective and innovative solutions for this segment with our partners.
How do you look at the competitive landscape in this segment of media and entertainment?
Of course competition is there. We are world leaders in the IT solutions space and we have optimized our offerings for the media segment. And as part of our strategy to work closely with our partners, we are looking forward to provide cloud driven media platform to our customers in this segment, so with our solutions, we can provide storage and computing virtualization for our customers.
How many customers do you have in India and what are your plans to increase your customer base in this segment?
As far as this segment is concerned, as of now we have three customers in India. This year we are looking for more than 10 customers, in the television, post production and also on the printing side of media.
The overall solution offering by Huawei focuses on functions such as media content production, broadcast and management. Our solutions come with super HD performance and reliability, expandability, widely used upper-layer acquisition, editing, broadcast, and management application software compatibility. All these deliver unique value proposition for our customers.
One of this most active segment within the media and entertainment comes from the storage part. How does Huawei look at the storage part of Media and entertainment industry?
In this year 2015 only, our new storage platform – the ‘V3 mid-range storage system’ will be launched in India. With the introduction of this platform, we have done optimization of our offering dedicated to the media sector. We believe that this will bring more value to our customers in the media space.
