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H3C’s digitalisation solutions for enterprises at WCIT 2022

H3C Malaysia presented its innovative digital transformation scenario-based digital solutions for Malaysian enterprises at the World Congress on Innovation and Technology (WCIT 2022) in Penang from 13th to 15th September 2022.

These solutions are part of company’s continued efforts to facilitate the digitalisation of Malaysian enterprises across diverse industries, and H3C displayed its unique digital solutions for select industry scenarios including education, healthcare, and public service at WCIT 2022.

H3C Malaysia is the Malaysian unit of the China-based New H3C Technologies Co,. Ltd., which offers a full portfolio of digital infrastructure products, platforms and infrastructure spanning across chips, compute, storage, networking, 4G and 5G cellular networks, security, terminal and related domains, as well as provides a comprehensive one-stop digital platform that includes cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), industrial internet, information security, intelligent connectivity, edge computing, as well as end-to-end technical services.

The company works with local ecosystem partners (a.k.a. value-added resellers, systems integrators and so forth) in Malaysia and worldwide, whose technical staff it trains and certifies in knowledge and implementation of its technologies.

These ecosystem partners have specific industry and domain knowledge, and they tailor H3C’s technologies, platform and solutions to address the specific needs, requirements and problems of their end-customers. They also have an intimate understanding of standards, regulatory, legal and other and compliance requirements specific to their industry and country, as well as within the context of the capacity of their respective countries’ communications infrastructure, culture and other domestic factors in each place at a given.

Rockies Ma

“A lot of end-customers are looking for what they actually get from digital transformation and as a technology, products and solutions provider, H3C needs to work with good ecosystem partners who understand their customers’ requirements, needs, pain-points and so forth, so they can provide digital applications as well as digital intelligence which they implement over our platform and infrastructure either on-premises or as a cloud-based service to customers to achieve a win-win-win outcome for all of us”, said Rockies Ma, H3C Malaysia General Manager.

“In turn, our ecosystem partners provide us with knowledge and understanding of their customers’ requirements, which enables us to modify and upgrade our platform to fit their end-customers’ requirements”, Ma added.

H3C currently has around 160 ecosystem partners in Malaysia, which focus on specific industry sectors such as public services, education, healthcare, banking & finance, manufacturing, hospitality and energy.

Ma informed us that HC3’s display booth at WCIT 2022 received many visitors from Malaysian government agencies and government-linked companies who were interested in how its technologies, platform and solutions can be used in their digital transformation.

“An energy company was also interested in new technologies and new innovative ideas, which is a very good sign,” said Ma.

Product to service-oriented shift

In digital transformation, the business models adopted by companies in different countries are not static, but rather something that will change based upon the economic conditions, the demands of the industry and the trends of the market, and H3C has grown, diversified and has expanded its exposure to a wider range of industries and has pursued even deeper relationships with its ecosystem partners.

In addition, H3C has keenly observed that the role of digital technologies in driving economic growth has been proven, and that companies have started to shift from product demand to service demand to break through certain bottlenecks in local economic development.

As a result, scenario-based solutions for different business requirements have become sought after amongst enterprise consumers, and H3C provides four scenario-based solutions – namely Synergy Working, Innovative Education, Efficient Healthcare, and Reliable Public Service.

When a customer wants to use H3C’s solution together with applications in a particular scenario, they may look for some specific features.

For example, public service systems and applications such as emergency call services such as fire, police, ambulance need to be operational 24×7 and cannot go down, so they will be looking for more redundancy to be built into their infrastructure. They will also need more greater security of data on the public, so they will be looking for some specific security features within their infrastructure.

“Besides that, they public service systems also need to comply with national laws, such as those related to personal data protection, regulations requiring storage of the data within national boundaries, international rules and compliance requirements, and this scenario requires us to work with our ecosystem partner to develop an end-to-end scenario-based solution which addresses these requirements,” said Ma.

In a retail scenario, there will be a lot of data collected and the end-user may want to analyse it, so we shifted our strategy from a product to service focus, with an emphasis on the benefits to the end-customer, delivered by the domain-knowledge of our ecosystem partner based upon H3C’s technology and platform.

Here, customers would be looking for a platform and digital infrastructure which lets them easily and quickly access their data for analysis using AI and other tools, and this needs to be able to interface through APIs (application programming interfaces) and other features which need to be customised to suit the customer’s or industry’s needs.

In healthcare, the system will have to handle multi-megabyte, high-definition images and videos, which will require larger storage and greater network capacity.

An Innovative Education solution helps by accurately understanding the business needs of Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) in Malaysia, providing strong support for the digital transformation of the university.

Synergy Working is part of H3C’s MagicHub scenario-based solutions which enables virtual communication and work collaboration between colleagues and partners with the virtual sharing of presentations, collaboration, brainstorming and video conferencing on PCs and smartphones, which greatly improves teamwork and efficiency.

More interest in digital transformation

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, H3C has noticed a significant surge in the numbers of inquiries from customers and business negotiations. Many Malaysian companies are pushing ahead with comprehensive digital transformation and have shown more interest in various solutions facilitating their digitalisation endeavours.

“Besides the public service, education and healthcare sectors in Malaysia, is manufacturing, which from H3C’s perspective have a more urgent demand for digitalisation, which enables them to see an improvement in their operations in a short time, whilst it still benefits other industries, though it may take longer for them to realise a return on their investment (RoI)”, said Ma.

“However, RoI is not a major consideration in industries such as public services which prioritise the provision of services to citizens, so they can realise and citizens experience the benefits immediately.

“Educational institutions such as UTAR also do not primarily think in terms of RoI but rather how digitalisation enables them to more efficiently and effectively educate their students, such as during the worst of the pandemic, when they needed to employ digital technology for more effective remote lectures and virtual education. They are now exploring ways to use H3C’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for education in the near future”, Ma added.

Micro Enterprises and SMEs (ME-SMEs)

Amongst the products highlighted was H3C Cloudnet, a new-generation network solution, can solve the network pain points faced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The solution helps realise efficient network management and cloud-based deployment, thus reducing operational burden.

H3C Cloudnet is H3C’s proprietary comprehensive operation management and maintenance platform. Based on H3C unified O&M (operations and maintenance) cloud platform (known as U-center), It provides a light-weight and multi-service platform to manage network and a powerful O&M service for small business.

It uses Kubernetes for containerised applications and a fully distributed architecture to provide management of networks, terminals, users and service enabling features. With management and monitoring of multiple network services, the platform breaks the data barriers between services caused by isolated and vertical service deployment.

Cloudnet supports the delivery model of public clouds and provides customers with comprehensive network solutions to meet the needs of customers from different industries and operators.

“Cloudnet enables ME-SMEs to spend little money each year to be able to manage their shops, devices and all their network equipment, so they can know who is connected to their network, bandwidth utilisation and the overall health of their digital infrastructure,” said Ma.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the hybrid work-from-home model has gradually become the norm. Therefore, H3C has provided customers with H3C UIS (HCI) solution and VDI-supported Cloud Desktop solution, offering simple and convenient management, secure data, and efficient deployment for the work environment.

H3C UIS HCI is a new generation product of cloud data centre infrastructure solution for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) including UIS 3000 and UIS 6000. It is pre-installed the industry-leading UIS HCI 7.0 software, which integrates computing, storage, network, security, O&M and cloud platform to achieve out-of-the-box.

The cloud computing environment can be built in 30 minutes to realise a simple hardware architecture platform with only servers and switches and a unified software defined data centre resource pool. By monitoring and managing the physical hardware and virtual resources of computing storage network in a unified way, the service can be deployed quickly and flexibly, and the overall TCO can be effectively reduced by unified management through a simple interface.

 H3C Workspace Cloud Desktop is a desktop virtualisation product based on the hybrid architecture of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), intelligent desktop virtualisation (IDV) and Virtual OS Infrastructure (VOI).

Relying on Workspace Cloud Desktop Studio, this product transfers the virtualised desktop components (including application software, OSes and user data) to the cloud data centre for hosting, manages and controls them in unified and centralised mode. Users can access the centralised desktop OS through thin clients, rich clients, mobile clients, PCs and other equipment, and get PC-like use experiences.

Green and smart campus solutions

With digital technologies becoming increasingly ubiquitous, industrial digital transformation is gradually expanding from the smallest units to whole campuses. As campuses are also the spatial carriers of economic development, smart campuses need to take into account industry characteristics, digital intelligence, and carbon emission reduction requirements. To this end, many countries are calling for more intelligent, low-carbon and replicable campus-wide solutions.

In response to the demand, the H3C introduced its Green and Intelligent Campus Solution comprised of four layers – namely, infrastructure, network transmission, a digital platform and smart applications. These can help customers build a zero-carbon operating system based on a digital platform and provide the impetus for the implementation of a full-scale campus-wide digital transformation.

The “green” aspect of H3C’s solution is achieved firstly by H3C’s servers, power supplies and other equipment being certified for compliance with internationally recognised environmentally-friendly standards.

“We go even further by employing or own innovative technologies such as liquid cooling of servers in our data centres, where especially high-power computing can generate a lot of heat, and liquid cooling is much more energy-efficient and cost-effective than air conditioning which consumes much more energy”, said Ma.

No one size fits all

However, Ma reiterated his earlier warning that no one size fits all in digitalisation, and just because a digitalisation project works well for one customer, it does not mean that it will necessarily work well for another.

Customers must be clear about what they want a technology to do for them, what problems they want it to solve, whether they need it to improve efficiency, cut costs, improve quality, attract more business, revenue and so forth, and also know whether or not their digital infrastructure can support future innovative applications, and this is where ecosystem partners can help them.

“Digital transformation is an ongoing process which can look forward two to three years and needs an evolving infrastructure”, said Ma. “Other possible applications include virtual laboratory experiments, which can be explored together with our ecosystem partners.

H3C was ranked No. 1 in China for enterprise wireless-LAN market share for 13 consecutive years and besides China, H3C has global offices in Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Philippines, Mexico, Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, Türkiye, South Africa, Singapore and Indonesia. It also has over 50 sales and service offices worldwide.

“H3C believes that in coming years, Malaysia will one of the world’s key players in digital technology and digital transformation,” Ma concluded.