Huawei Cloud: Cloud for Good, Bringing Innovation to Life
Dec 06, 2024
[Manila, Philippines, December 3, 2024] At the Huawei Cloud Summit Philippines 2024, Aka Dai, the Director of Huawei Cloud Marketing, delivered a keynote titled "Cloud for Good: Bringing Innovation to Life", highlighted Huawei Cloud's belief in using technology for the greater good and unveiled the "Cloud for Good" initiative. Cloud and AI can also help advance sustainable development and social progress in the Philippines and build a better future for the world.
Mr. Dai, Director of Huawei Cloud Marketing, delivering a keynote speech
Cloud for Good with Everything as a Service
Huawei Cloud envisions an intelligent future with "Everything as a Service". Leveraging Huawei's over 30 years of experience in digital transformation, Huawei Cloud strives to transform these into cloud services that enable everyone to not only succeed but also lead in their digital journey. According to Mr. Dai, Huawei Cloud also envisions a future with "Cloud for Good", and is committed to making this vision a reality and promoting social progress through innovative technologies such as cloud and AI.
At this summit, these visions were illustrated through three stories:
AI-assisted Forecasts on Extreme Weather to Safeguard People's Lives
Global warming and frequent extreme weather pose a threat to human lives and cause great economic losses, impacting countries and regions like the Philippines. Huawei Cloud's response to these challenges is the Pangu weather model, an AI large model trained on a massive dataset of global weather observations spanning the past 40 years. Pangu model can predict the global typhoon path for the next 10 days. In sharp contrast, traditional methods require multiple hours and several thousand high-performance servers. During the flood season in the northwest pacific region in 2023, the Pangu weather model successfully predicted the paths of super typhoons such as Saola.
Mr. Dai also shared a story about Mitao Forecast, a local NGO in Madagascar. This NGO further utilized the Pangu weather model, extending the effective forecast time from 3 days to 10 days. In predicting extreme weather such as typhoons, Pangu has demonstrated significant advantages, helping local fishermen respond more calmly to the harsh weather, thereby protecting the lives and property of 600,000 to 750,000 local people.
More Inclusive, Accessible Digital Finance Enabled by Cloud
UnionDigital Bank, the digital subsidiary of Unionbank, is the first digital bank in the Philippines. Their customer base covers people in financial hardship, small businesses, and communities. They aim to promote local financial inclusion and community development.
In the Philippines, there are around 70 to 80 million people with a monthly income of less than 10,000 pesos (about USD200). Many of them do not even have bank accounts and urgently need financial assistance. UnionDigital believes that digitalization is the go-to solution. They needed to upgrade their core systems and build a loan platform based on central bank compliance standards.Huawei Cloud responded swiftly to this challenge. With container services and cloud native security operation platform solution, Huawei Cloud helped UnionDigital build a cloud-native digital core. By using Huawei Cloud CCE containers, UnionDigital can scale in just seconds for peak hours to serve a large user base and high-frequency transactions. The end-to-end security operations by SecMaster takes good care of the bank's core system. Intelligent analysis and real-time protection ensure there are zero security incidents.
"In collaboration with our partner Sunline, in last September, Huawei Cloud helped UnionDigital deploy their new critical core system in just 35 days, a process that typically takes 3 to 6 months in the industry," shared Mr. Dai.
Following this, UnionDigital quickly launched small online loan services in the first quarter this year to serve those in need. This effort also helped UnionDigital rise in the ranking of market share in the Philippines, and made financial services more accessible to millions of Filipinos.
Cultivating Future-Oriented Tech Talent and Providing Smart Classrooms
Education is the cornerstone of social development. Huawei has initiated and upgraded the 'Seeds for the Future' program, providing digital training such as cloud computing, AI, and 5G. This program has reached over 150 countries and regions, benefiting more than 3.4 million people all around the world. In the Philippines, this program is expanding too, attracting students from top universities across the nation. Until now, 228 students have joined the Huawei Seeds Class and some of them also visited China.In addition to talent cultivation, Huawei also elevates teaching and learning experience with advanced technologies. Mabalacat City College (MCC) is a community college, which aims to promote inclusion and equal access to education opportunities, especially for physically challenged students and working professionals. They are piloting smart education using Huawei Smart Classroom based on AI, cloud computing, big data, 5G, and IoT. Huawei Smart Classroom Solution meets diverse needs, such as classroom recording, interaction, and lecturing. "Teaching can become intelligent and interactive, and the system is easy to operate. Now, their teachers and students can teach and learn anytime, anywhere. No one should be left behind in the digital era," said Mr. Dai.
Looking ahead, Huawei will extend its partnership with more universities and colleges to build smarter classes or campuses for more students, improving teaching efficiency and quality while making educational resources more accessible and equitable.
Cloud for Good: Bringing Innovation to Life in the Philippines
Huawei Cloud aims to aiming build the cloud foundation for an intelligent Philippines. "These are stories of collaboration, innovation, and a strong belief in the power of cloud." At the end, Mr. Dai proposed the "Cloud for Good" initiative, calling on partners and customers in the Philippines to join hands in accelerating the local digital journey, especially in agriculture, environment, talent and healthcare, to benefit more people, rejuvenate the nature, and contribute to a better home for all.