Huawei Not Bailing on U.S. EnterpriseHuawei Not Bailing on U.S. Enterprise

The company has "tweaked" its strategy, but is very much in the game, a Huawei exec told me at Interop

For a company that was reported to be abandoning the U.S. market, Huawei Enterprise is keeping itself pretty busy on these shores of late. Their booth at Interop last week was staffed up and well-trafficked, and next week they'll be holding "ICT Nation," the Huawei Enterprise Partner Summit, in Cupertino, near the company's U.S. base in Santa Clara, where they expect to host 60-70 U.S. partners.

So clearly last month's reports about Huawei giving up on the U.S. were incorrect. Which is not to say that there haven't been changes already in the year-and-a-half-long effort to break into the U.S. enterprise market.

One of the highest-profile changes had to do with personnel--in late 2011, Huawei made a splash by hiring industry veteran John Roese, formerly of Enterasys and Nortel, as its VP and GM for North America. Roese stayed in the job for just a year before departing to become CTO of EMC.

Another shift, I learned last week, has to do with Huawei product strategy. At Interop, I had a chance to sit down with Jane Li, COO of Huawei Enterprise U.S., and she explained that Huawei was refining its North American strategy to put a heavier emphasis on the Cloud, about which she said, "The big inflection point for this market is the transition to Cloud." She said that inflection point wasn't as obvious in late 2011 as it seems now.

In its initial entry to the North American market, Huawei talked about switches and routers in general terms, suggesting that they were planning to take a run at Cisco in these main product areas, with further efforts around wireless and telepresence. As the Cloud has developed and new technologies, most notably SDN, have emerged in the last 12-18 months, Huawei is attempting to ride these trends. "From that point of view, our strategy got tweaked a little," she said.

Among the products on display at Interop last week was an all-in-one datacenter product that packages storage, network and server capabilities in a single rack, part of Huawei's Cloud play. The company also highlighted its 802.11ac solutions; this is another area where they hope that a market disruption, with the upgrade to the new WLAN standard, can give them an opening.

One unusual product pitch that Huawei made at its Interop booth--and one that John Roese was talking about a year and a half ago--involves a seeming oxymoron: Enterprise LTE. Huawei talked up case studies, mostly in the energy and transportation industry, where its LTE infrastructure was being used by large enterprises to network sprawling or dispersed areas on a completely enterprise-owned and operated infrastructure.

As regards the UC market, Huawei is a strong player outside the U.S.; but they made it clear when first moving into the U.S. enterprise market a year and a half ago that UC wouldn't be a major early play for them here. That decision seems to be holding.

It also seems like a smart move, at a time when other big international vendors' North American UC operations--such as Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, and Siemens--continue to find it a tough battle to make headway against Cisco and Microsoft.

Maybe by staying out of the UC fray in North America, Huawei is missing a chance, and will end up trying to crack a hardened duopoly in a couple of years. Or maybe the number of market players will decline, at which point enterprises will be ready in a few years to look at a new, well-funded competitor.

In any event, it seems likely that the North American vendor landscape in UC will look very different in a few years--and it's hard to believe Huawei won't be a factor.

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