Working with regional partners, Huawei Cloud launched a Start-up Programme for the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. The initiative provides SMEs in these regions with Huawei cloud credits, technical support, talent development training and business resources to drive their growth.
The Huawei Cloud Start-up Programme was launched on the sidelines of the Huawei Cloud Summit Middle East & Africa 2023 in Dubai. Under the theme of ‘Inspire Innovation with Everything-as-a-Service’, the summit brought together over 300 government leaders, cloud-native industry experts and customer representatives from the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa to explore how to make the best out of cloud and the vital role of cloud in driving digital economy growth in the region.
The programme demonstrates Huawei’s commitment to building a regional start-up ecosystem to empower 1,000 start-ups in the region to innovate and grow on Huawei Cloud by 2025.
The launch ceremony was attended by representatives from the UAE Ministry of Economy, Middle East incubator GEN Asia, Dinarak – Jordan’s licensed payment services provider, Ignite – a non-profit company owned by the Government of Pakistan and administered by the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication and Kuwait’s start-up representatives, Eyon TV, One Global and Empower.
Frank Dai, the President of Huawei Cloud Middle East and Central Asia, said: “SMEs are the backbone of the regional economy. However, small businesses struggle to digitise their processes, thus missing out on the immense opportunities of the digital economy. Huawei wants to empower regional entrepreneurs with the tools to succeed in the digital age by adopting cloud services; we believe the Huawei Cloud Start-up Programme is an essential building block for growth in the modern age and by empowering more SMEs with such programmes, we can jointly cultivate a robust technology ecosystem in the region.”
The summit also provided an opportunity to explore the latest innovations in cloud-native technologies. Cloud-native has emerged as an essential driver of Digital Transformation, with Gartner predicting that 95% of digital services will run on cloud-native platforms by 2025. Cloud-native greatly improves productivity and imposes increasing requirements on digital capabilities.
More industries are going digital and many have entered Cloud-native 2.0. The concept of Cloud-native 2.0 was first proposed by Huawei Cloud, and it is a new phase for an intelligent upgrade of enterprises. The move to cloud changes from ‘On Cloud’ to ‘In Cloud’, where applications and services are not only migrated to the cloud but also being built on the cloud. Together with Cloud-native Computing Foundation (CNCF), China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and industry experts, Huawei Cloud founded Cloud-native Elite Cloud, a global cloud-native community, to boost the cloud-native ecosystem. In the Cloud-native 2.0 era, a new cloud-native enterprise is no longer a possibility, but a reality.