ISP Summit: Huawei, Partners Strategize to Unlock ASEAN Digital Connectivity Growth

The summit, in its third year, took the theme of “Leading New ICT, Achieve and Accelerate Digital Revolution with ISP”. At the summit, Huawei and partners discussed key industry trends, connected with other industry players, and showed their latest innovations in cloud computing, among other smart technologies.

Collectively, ASEAN is the sixth largest economy in the world. Its rapidly growing digital economy generates about US$150 billion in revenue annually. According to a recent study, the region has the potential to generate an additional US$1 trillion in combined GDP by 2025 with a robust digital agenda. In ASEAN, the amount of cross-border bandwidth that is used has grown 45 times larger from 2005 to 2016. It is projected to increase by an additional nine times by 2021 as flows of information, searches, communication, video, transactions, and intra-company traffic continue to surge.

The digital integration of ASEAN will promote rapid growth of the digital economy, including safe and smart city solutions, to stimulate economic development and inform social intelligence. As ASEAN sets the stage for a single digital economy to harness its full economic potential, it is crucial for key players within the ICT sector to collaborate and contribute to the robust infrastructure necessary to accelerate ASEAN’s growth.

L-R: Mark Wu, Chief Technology Officer of IP Solution, Huawei Enterprise Networking Marketing and Solution; Patrick Low, Chief Technology Officer, Huawei Enterprise Data Center Solutions; Chu Xin, Vice President, Huawei Network Energy Product Line

Daniel Zhou, President, South Pacific, Huawei Enterprise Business Group said: “Technological innovation and an open ecosystem are critical to the success of digital initiatives. As ASEAN sets the foundation for a unified digital economy, close collaboration between key industry players are key to ensure a solid foundation for a thriving digital economy. Huawei is committed to improving the region and working with our partners for a better connected future.”

Randy Roberts, Research Director at IDC, shared in his keynote speech, entitled “Regional ASEAN ICT Development – Towards a Single Unified Digital Economy”, that businesses in Asia Pacific have made progress in advancing digital maturity, but most of them are in the “Digital Explorer” stage, where digitally enabled customer experiences and products are inconsistent and poorly integrated. However, signs of a potential rise in the number of enterprises embarking on digital transformation signal an opportunity for key players in the region.

Huawei is dedicated to working with partners across industries to empower their digital transformation and enrich their services to thrive in the new ICT era. As a case in point, Huawei is working with Converge, an ISP partner in the Philippines, to build an innovative next-generation network. Converge’s legacy network had too many layers with an unclear architecture, affecting the fast rollout and configuration of new services. Huawei created a three-year network construction solution and formulated a service deployment plan so that Converge’s new network is elastic, simple, and future-oriented to adapt to new services.