Huawei Sets Aside $1B for DevelopersHuawei Sets Aside $1B for Developers

Huawei has set aside up to US$1 billion to help developers build enterprise and carrier apps and solutions.

The company announced at the first Huawei Developer Conference in Shenzhen Monday that it will also support developers through a new platform centered on the Lab-as-a-service concept.

Ryan Ding, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. 's executive director and president of products and solutions, said the Chinese vendor had built an open environment and enablement platform for both carrier and enterprise markets.

"The aim is to help developers create innovative services and rapidly respond to customers' business needs," he said.

Huawei will invest $1 billion over the next five years on direct support for developers as well as the enablement platform and joint innovation with some developers.

The new platform, called eSDK, will help developers accelerate innovation and improve their ability to create differentiated solutions.

It's based on what Huawei has called LEADS (Lab-as-a-service, end-to-end, agile, dedicated and social).

For developers, Huawei says it will lay on the cloud-based Lab-as-a-service, end-to-end development resources and agile development tools.

Want to know more about cloud services? Check out our dedicated cloud services content channel here on Light Reading. The company hasn't given specifics on the kinds of solutions it hopes to entice developers to build, but Ding name-checked broad technology areas such as cloud computing, big data, IoT, mobile broadband, SDN and BYOD. Huawei says the developer program builds on earlier efforts to nurture developer relations, such as its joint hosting of an annual OpenStack Hackathon in China with Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC). It also said it hopes to forge business partnerships with developers. The plans underscore Huawei's embrace of open source over the past three years. They also show that it expects the reworking of telecom network architectures now under way to lead to a more IT-centric model in the industry's business environment. — Robert Clark, contributing editor, special to Light Reading