Huawei’s bid to be a player in China’s cloud computing scene got a little stronger Tuesday with the signing of a deal with Microsoft to host more of the software giant’s apps on its cloud.
Just five months into the making of Huawei’s public cloud strategy, the two companies signed a deal that will see more of Microsoft’s enterprise technology software become available on Huawei’s public cloud. Huawei launched its public cloud service in April with support for Windows Server and RDS (relational database service) for SQL Server, but customers running other Microsoft apps on-premises will now be able to take advantage of a cloud option for those apps through the new partnership.
Cloud computing in China is the domain of home-grown companies, with Alibaba as the country’s leading provider of cloud computing services. Baidu and Tencent are also going after cloud customers, while U.S. companies like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft operate their cloud services through a local subsidiary. The overall market is a little behind where the global cloud computing market is at the moment, but demand for cloud services in China is expected to surge over the next decade.
Microsoft and Huawei will cooperate on bringing new services to Huawei’s customers, the two companies said in a statement. The announcement kicks off the Huawei Connect 2017 conference, which is being held in Shanghai.
