Even though many people know Huawei only for their devices, Huawei is one of the biggest telecom infrastructure provider in the world and works with nearly all major telecom service providers across the globe.

Huawei Connect is Huawei’s annual Enterprise Business Group event where it covers many keynotes, panel discussions and expo regarding the latest technology in the field of telecommunications, wireless and cloud technology, ICT and more.

It is one of the biggest ICT industry event and Huawei has just concluded the Huawei Connect 2017 event, 5th-7th September, in Shanghai at the Shanghai New International Expo Center Here is a brief summary of the event covering its highlights.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

Huawei Connect 2017 - Highlights and Summary




Huawei Connect 2017 event started with a gala dinner for media on the night of 4th September. The first day of Huawei Connect 2017 started with the keynote speech on the topic Grow with the Cloud: Enabling an Intelligent World by Mr. Guo Ping, Rotating CEO of Huawei. He covered how governments and companies can take advantage of cloud technology to achieve new levels of success.

Huawei is working extensively on smart city projects in various countries and smart city was one of the important topic at the event and part of various keynotes and expo. Shanghai government officials gave a keynote speech on the topic Smart City : Innovative Shanghai giving the first-hand insights into Shanghai’s transformation into a Smart City.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

Mr. Ed Diender, Vice President of Huawei’s Government and Public Utility Sector, had a special session with key opinion leaders in which he talked about how ICT innovations can help in creating a safer, greener and smarter airports over a lunch specially prepared by the only 3-Star Michelin chef in China.

Stephen Hu, Marketing Leader of Honeywell Smart Building and Home Appliance Group shared the interesting information that how Honeywell and Huawei share the fruit of smart building cooperation

The keynote on the topic Huawei Cloud: Bridging the Present and Future had many speakers including Mr. Jan van Eldik, Resource Provisioning Services Team Lead at CERN and he provided lots of informative data about Hadron Collider and how Huawei is working with CERN.

Other speakers in this keynote were Zheng Yelai - President of Huawei’s Cloud BU, Yang Xiaoling – CDO of China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co. Ltd.; Li Qiang - Division Chief of Shenzhen Traffic Police Bureau and Thierry Bonhomme, CEO of Orange Business Service explanining how governments and businesses can be smarter and stay competitive through cloud in the age of digital transformation.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

There were many other keynote speeches throughout the first day of event as below

- Diana Yuan, President of Marketing & Product Solution Sales Department of Huawei Enterprise BG, shared the insight that how Huawei and Fortune Global 500 companies win in the new ICT era together.

- Mr. Renzo Valente, Head of Global Telecommunications of ENEL and Mr. Wang Zhengan, President of Huawei’s Access Network Product Line, talked about ENEL's road of digital transformation.

- Rob Newman, Head of Programme Management, Technology & Infrastructure at Dubai International Airport and Mr. Yu Xilin, President of Transportation Sector in Huawei Enterprises BG shared interesting information regarding the digital transformation of Dubai International Airport.

- Alain STARON, SVP Digital Innovation of Veolia and Jiang Wangcheng, Deputy President of Huawei P&S Marketing and Solution Dept, talked about Huawei’s latest enterprise-grade IoT solution and shared the IoT success story in Europe.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

There was a detailed and dedicated session about the digital economy at Huawei Connect 2017 that covered the below speeches and panel discussions about how digital economy helps in increasing the National Competitiveness, creates a new model for economic growth and brings new development opportunities

The Future of Digital Economy Forum

• The benefits and opportunities of digital economy

• Preparing for the future digital economy


Intelligent Technology, Digital Transformation, and the Role of ICT Providers


• Industries that are likely to leverage smart technology and seize growth opportunities

• Developing countries are using smart technology to achieve leapfrog development

• The role of ICT providers in enabling the intelligent world

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

The first keynote of second day was based on how connectivity and cloud together can lead us to faster digitization and its benefits. The speakers for the Connectivity + Cloud: Faster Digitization were Mr. David Wang - President of Products & Solutions of Huawei; Prof. Dr. Suchatvee Suwansawat – President of King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang; Michael Nilles – CDO of Schindler Group, Jerry Li - Vice President, and Head of Business Development of ABB China

The second keynote Huawei Cloud - Technology & Product Innovation also had lots of speakers as below;

- Joy Huang, Vice President, IT Product Line, Huawei

- Wang Xiaoping, Fellow, Software Development Center, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China

- Jean-Christophe Marchal, Executive Deputy General Manager, Dongfeng Peugeot Citroen Automobile Company Ltd.

Huawei organized a special session of international KOLs with Joy Tan and Walter Jennings, President and Vice President of Huawei’s Global Media and Communications Department, respectively. The session was based on Huawei Enterprise unit’s various media campaign, their concept, message and how they reflect Huawei’s belief in a bold spirit of Exploration that can unfold exciting journeys leading to innovation, inspiration and ideas.

It was a nice experience to know about Huawei’s philosophy in a special session and how they want to come forward to share their ideas with the world and do not hesitate to have an intimate one-to-one Q&A session with influencers and media.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

Another special session organized for International KOLs was by Huawei’s Consumer Business Group’s Handset Business unit in which Mr. Li Changzhu, Vice President of Huawei Consumer Business Group’s Handset Business interacted about the high-end series handset product strategy, research and development, and integrated operation and delivery.

The session was oriented on the recently announced Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 970 processor, about its features, the new NPU in the SoC, how it is better than the other high-end processor currently available in the market and how the AI capability of Kirin 970 will bring the smartphone user experience to a new level.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

The third day of Huawei Connect 2017 event was full of keynotes and panel discussions. It started with the keynote by Mr. Yan Lida, President of Huawei Enterprise Business Group, about how Huawei is creating a global platform and ecosystem for a better connected world.

Dr. Markus Voss, CIO & COO of Supply Chain in Deutsche Post DHL Group talked about how DHL is using the drones and virtual reality for better productivity and to serve customer better.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

Yu Dong, President of Industry Marketing & Solution, Enterprise Business Group in Huawei shared some great stat like the latest AI can detect a face correctly among a billion input data and face recognition is improved 1000 times in last two years. Mr. Patrick Zhang, President of Marketing & Solutions of Huawei, talked about the DevCloud2.0 launch.

Then again, there was a special one-to-one session of International KOLs and influencers with Huawei's X-Labs team. If you do not know, X-Labs is Huawei’s R&D team that works on various projects with other brands for innovative and futuristic products on four key areas for future #technology - Cloud VR AR, Drones, Connected Vehicles and Wireless Robotics.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

But my favorite part of the Huawei Connect 2017 was the expo. As an engineer, I always want and prefer to see all the technology implementation in reality or at least in the form of prototype demo. And the Huawei Connect 2017 expo was filled with lots of interesting stuff.

Under the Safe and Smart City, there were many nice implementation of AI and object detection technology such as real-time detection of the vehicle information like plate number, type and model of vehicle etc. There was a demo of real-time object detection whether an object person is carrying is dangerous or not.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

There was a fun facial response detection demo that detects the expression of a person and displays it in the form of emoji along with some nice stat as well. You can watch it in the Huawei Connect 2017 summary video above.

Then there were many interesting ideas and demos about cloud technology, IoT along with some fun AR and AI demos. You can watch few of them in the video shared above as well.

And one of the major attraction at the expo was Huawei X-Labs booth where some high-tech futuristic gadgets were available for demo.

Huawei Connect 2017 Event

One of them was an AI-powered helmet with 5 cameras designed to detect the environment and objects around to inform the user, a very useful device for people with poor eyesight. Another interesting gadget was a prototype drone that can fly hundreds of miles away and comes with great camera and huge battery life to serve the purpose.

Overall Huawei Connect 2017 was a top quality industry event and I loved the way Huawei organized a big event like this perfectly in every aspect even the meal arrangement for 20,000 attendees was managed in such a beautiful way.

Looking forward to attend the Huawei Connect 2018 now.
 
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