Huawei sets out on long Indian R&D route

Huawei, a global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions behemoth based in China, has made Bengaluru its R&D hub for global product development and services delivery.

Huawei India Research and Development Centre (HIRDC) is now a key platform, component and solutions development and delivery centre for global markets. The advantage of having a more talented software workforce prompted the company to set up the Huawei India R&D Centre in 1999, and now it is the largest facility among its 16 development centres across the world, with around 3,000 software engineers, market technical support engineers and management professionals.

The India R&D centre is engaged in developing products and components including telecom value-added services (VAS), business support systems (BSS), operation support systems (OSS), ecommerce and terminal device software. It is also developing cutting-edge software in the areas of big data, cloud, network functions virtualisation (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN), Internet of Things (IoT), and storage, says Huawei Telecommunications (India) Company Chief Executive Officer Jay Chen.

The company believes in building a strong intellectual property (IP) base as a core competency to ensure that the company stays competitive in the global telecom equipment market. Huawei India has filed over 400 patent applications in the areas of Network Management System (NMS), OSS, protocols, service delivery platform, intelligent network, IPv4, IPv6, rich communication platform, business intelligence, IP, SDN, and NFV, among others.

Bigger role in innovation

Huawei India R&D Centre Chief Operating Officer William Zhao said it has evolved to play a bigger role in the innovation journey of Huawei. “It is creating future-oriented technologies, and supports the digital transformation of society. Today, the centre is the largest among all overseas R&D centres of Huawei – it is also the largest by any telecom vendor in India as it provides end-to-end network solutions to all the India-based top-10 telecom operators,” he tells DH.

The India division celebrated its 15 years by inaugurating a massive 20-acre campus, with a 1 million-sq feet Bengaluru R&D centre in 2015 with a total investment of over $150 million.

Huawei is embarking upon next-generation networks, routing platforms and open-source software in the telecom sector. “In SDN, we are working on ONOS Open source and Huawei Agile controller OVS protocols, working on cutting-edge technologies such as PCE, NAI, Hierarchical controller, YMS research,” he said.

ONOS has become the de-facto Carrier SDN Controller in the industry with high availability and reliability, scale and best suited for IP+Optical. Huawei’s contribution is significant to enhance ONOS with key carrier capabilities. Huawei’s BGP RR+ solution commercial solutions are deployed widely; PCECC [PCE] is a unique solution from Huawei for SDN transition for existing Network to SDN-based network.

“Our VRP team is working on routing protocols, Netconf Yang and PCEP and IPSEC protocol development and research, which are key technologies for virtual network solutions in the 5G era. In the cloud space, we are contributing to Huawei private cloud and public cloud strategy and focusing on technical research projects and open-source work in PAAS layer,” he said.

In the database area, the centre has end-to-end responsibility for development of database tools and also takes ownership of key modules in-memory database development. In storage, the centre will develop next-generation all-Flash NAS software. In ecommerce, we have ownership for development of Huawei’s ecommerce platform – VMALL, for overseas website development.

Huawei’s open source strategy is very strongly focused from Bengaluru. “We are today engaged in various open-source communities such as Hadoop, CarbonData, Kubernetes and Mesos from our BL and contribute some important features in these communities,” he says.

Big data

In big data, the Huawei India R&D centre has responsibility for Hadoop distribution and Carbon Data and contributes to Huawei Data Pipeline service for cloud. In future, it will also be responsible for spark distribution, and thus play a significant role in Huawei’s big data strategy.

The Huawei India R&D centre in Bengaluru has identified the need for collaboration and contribution to open source years ahead, and has been playing active role in executing Huawei’s open source strategy and contributing to open source projects in SDN, NFV, cloud, big data and analytics domains. Huawei India R&D centre, with support of a strong local ecosystem, is driving innovations in various domains through community collaboration and cooperation.

The centre has contributed to CarbonData project which was formally incubated to Apache Software Foundation by Huawei in June 2016. Apache CarbonData is a fully-indexed columnar and Hadoop native data-store for processing heavy analytical workloads and detailed queries on big data.

Research focus

Huawei India R&D will be focusing on research in latest technologies like real time AI, NLP and machine-learning. “With the help of real-time AI and NLP, we have planned to provide proactive assistant to our smartphone-user using conversational technology, which can understand the user and provide right assistant services on our smart devices,” he said.

In all Flash storage NAS, the India R&D centre will contribute towards meeting some of the technological challenges, and then work towards delivery of the version. “In the cloud and digital transformation era, we would like to work closely with customers and identify the customer challenges related to network, and work with them to find innovative solutions to overcome those challenges and pain-points. For example, network artificial intelligence, 5G, etc,” he says.

Video is one of the strategic domains, and most important to Huawei’s Pipe Strategy, as the company believes that it will be a basic service by 2020.

Huawei has developed a Unified Video Solution for multiple networks including IPTV, OTT, DVB and Web TV. The India R&D team is focusing on video quality of experience monitoring and control solutions for IPTV, OTT and WEB TV Users.

Collaborations with academia

The ICT giant believes in cooperating with its peers, partners and academia to jointly create a favourable environment.Commenting on it, Huawei Technologies India Director - Corporate Affairs Gilbert Millicent Nathan Huawei partners with universities and colleges around the world to transfer knowledge, promote a greater understanding and interest in the telecommunications sector, and encourage participation in the digital community.

“At the Bengaluru R&D Centre, Huawei is working with leading engineering institutions, such as IIIT-B and PESIT to set up Network Innovation Labs in the area of next-generation networking like SDN and NFV,”said Gilbert.

Besides providing context awareness and user-centric intelligent functional system for better user experience using machine learning, Huawei India R&D centre’s goal is to develop solutions in AI and NLP to build next-generation intelligent solutions for end-consumers. Based on user behaviour and profiling, real-time optimised recommendations are made through machine-learning and content rendering through multi-service big data cloud platforms.

In the smartphone development, delivery of new Android OS upgrades for some of our important product portfolio across the global market is done from India R&D. The centre is also working closely with Android ASOP open source initiative to bring android new feature to the our customer.

The company, which serves over a third of the world’s population and currently is in the 129th position in the Fortune 500 companies ranking globally, aims to enrich life and improve efficiency through a better connected world through a new business segment called ‘boundless computing’ and acting as a responsible corporate citizen.