Huawei is all set to bring its first open innovation lab to India to build smart city solutions along with its partners.

The lab, which is expected to come up in Gurgaon by May, will be separate from Huawei’s existing R&D lab in Bengaluru that houses over 3,000 engineers.

“This will be a big investment that we’ll be making in the country. That lab will do joint testing, development for major smart city applications. Our headquarters lab already has Honeywell, SAP among others as our partners. We will bring them to India along with local ISVs,” Derek Hao, President, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei India, told BusinessLine .

Focus areas

The lab will focus on smart transportation, safe city, smart metering, smart lighting and smart parking solutions. However, these are just initial aspects of smart cities that Huawei will be focussing on and the company plans to add more modules going forward.

Huawei’s Enterprise Business group is a fast growing unit within the company. Last year, Huawei revenues stood at $92 billion while its Enterprise Business stood at $8.2 billion, growing at 45 per cent year-on-year. In India, the Huawei Enterprise Business Group is growing even faster than overall growth rate globally.

Huawei’s enterprise business started in India six years ago and it’s already working with some of the largest banks, oil and gas companies and retail firms here.

To raise partner base

While Huawei has over 8,000 employees in India, the company will be rapidly expanding its Enterprise Business Group in the coming year. “We are expanding our manpower for the enterprise business this year because we see a lot of opportunities. Beyond this, we are also looking at doubling our partner base to 1,000 from current 500. These partners will be our extended arm,” Hao said.

Huawei Enterprise Business Group also signed its third distributor in the country Savex Technology to expand its business-to-business sales in the country.

Savex is the third largest information and communication technology distributor in India and as a part of this strategic tie-up, will be responsible for Huawei’s channel partner network technical training and development. As part of this partnership, Savex will support Huawei in developing resellers to market and promote products and services to small and medium enterprises. Huawei, however, will continue to serve its large enterprise customers directly.

Related Topics