华为咬定美国市场

目前，华为在北美采取的是何种策略？

    几年前的华为经历了一段顺畅的发展期。公司超乎寻常的表现让所有竞争对手都感受到了冲击。但问题在于，如果表现这么出色，公司就不再是追随者了，对创新的预期值也会提高——因此，必须扮演定义互联网行业的角色。所以，公司的决策之一是，创新不能仅在中国国内进行。如果公司希望广泛涉猎从云技术到光电技术的一切领域，就必须制定范围更广的创新策略。2010年，我加入公司时，大约只有300人，而今华为美国市场员工已达到1,000人，而且全都是资深技术人才。我们希望成为公司发展的急先锋。我们不考虑公司之前的或现有的项目，我们只想知道行业未来的发展趋势，比如是开发下一代网络处理器，还是步入云时代。与此同时，公司把美国市场视为最后的新兴市场。没有一家公司会把总部设在一个无任何业务联系的国家。另一方面，虽然华为仍在不断摸索和努力适应美国市场，但公司已经在这一市场投入了大量的研发能力。

华为目前在美国市场的经营状况如何？

    我之前将美国市场称为“发展中”市场，曾引广泛反响。思科或爱立信（Ericsson）等大部分公司，都将中国视为一个发展中市场，但我们却认为美国市场正处于发展之中。当然，这并不是说美国市场不够发达，而是说我们需要学会如何去适应这这个市场，这对我们来说是个新的课题。虽然公司从美国市场获得的收入流并不显著，但我们在研发方面却取得了很大的进展。去年，单是华为对美国市场的研发投资一项便高达2亿至3亿美元。公司的终端业务表现不错，在商店里也可以买到华为自有品牌的平板电脑和智能手机。公司的运营商业务也比较顺利，不过，与美国四大运营商的合作目前还未能实现。但我们仍在不懈努力。如今，我们已经打入了美国的企业市场。这是一次全新的突破，但华为要想建立起关键的客户群仍需耗费数年时间。

你们的研发中心目前的攻克重点是哪些技术？

    最重要的研发目标是云计算技术。数据中心虚拟化是个不错的主意。但这并非我们研发云计算技术的真正目的。云计算技术的真正目标是，建立一个全互联网规模的公用环境，而非仅限于数据中心。所以，我们的工作就是重新思考如何步入云时代。我们如何才能实现云技术不仅服务于传统数据中心的虚拟化，而且广泛应用于无线接入网络、无线环境、网络基础架构、企业环境等。如果这些都能实现虚拟化，我们就可以开始考虑在互联网上提供服务。此外，我们也在致力于其他技术的研发，诸如高速网络、电子教育或电子医疗等。

    译者：阿龙/汪皓

What's the current strategy in North America?

    A few years ago Huawei was going through a cathartic moment. They had done an exceptional job out-executing everybody. The problem is that if you do that very well eventually you are no longer a follower, and the expectation to innovate is significantly higher—you have to define the networking industry. So one of the decisions they made was that that innovation could not exclusively happen in China, because if we're going to do everything from cloud to photonics, we better figure out an innovation strategy that's going to be much broader. When I walked in the door [in 2010] we had roughly 300 people, now we're at about 1,000, and they're all senior-level technical staff. We want to be the tip of the arrow. We don't care about previous or existing projects, we want to know where the industry is going, whether it's developing the next network processor or navigating the cloud era. At the same time, we are in market that the company views as our last emerging market. Nobody would put their headquarters in a country they have no business in. We on the other hand have put a lot of our R&D capacity in the center of a market that we're still figuring out how to navigate.

How are you doing in the U.S.?

    I got a lot of reactions because I once called the U.S. a "developing" market. Most companies like Cisco or Ericsson look at China as a developing market, but for us we look at the U.S. as a developing market. It's not that it's an undeveloped market, it's just that learning how to navigate it is new to us. But even though the revenue stream is not significant from the U.S. you can see that we're fully engaged on the R&D side. Huawei spent between $200 million to $300 million in the U.S. just on R&D last year. We're doing very well in our terminal business and you can buy Huawei tablets and smartphones in stores. The carrier business has done okay for us but we're largely excluded from the top four operators. But we're persistent. We've now entered the enterprise market in the U.S. That's brand new and it will take a couple of years to build up our critical mass there.

What kind of technologies are your labs working on?

    The biggest thing is cloud. Like virtualizing the data center is a good idea but if that's cloud we have wildly undershot. The real objective of the cloud is to build this utility-based environment that is internet scale, that is not just the data center. So what we're doing here is we're rethinking how we can navigate that cloud era. How can we get to a point where the cloud is not just to a traditional data center virtualized but it's actually includes the radio access networks, the wireless environments, the internet infrastructure, the enterprise environments. If all of it is virtualized then you can start thinking very intelligently about placing services anywhere on the internet. There's lots of other things like faster networks. We're also rethinking things like e-education or e-healthcare.