Brazil’s WDC to offer Huawei Cloud, double down on edge datacenters

Brazilian IT and power equipment distributor WDC Networks is further expanding its commercial tie-up with Huawei, with plans to add the Chinese company’s cloud computing solutions to its portfolio.

The Brazilian company also intends to advance in the edge datacenter segment, especially for small internet service providers (ISPs).

“Today we have practically the entire Huawei product portfolio. We started with solar, then entered datacenters, followed by UPS, energy, and a networking product for SMEs. Now we've added optical solutions aimed at ISPs and the corporate market,” CEO Vanderlei Rigatieri told BNamericas.

“We have practically everything [from Huawei]. The only thing missing is cloud, which we should enter by the end of the year,” said the executive, speaking on the sidelines of the Abrint ISP congress last week in São Paulo.

Rigatieri's initial plan is to be a distributor of Huawei Cloud services for integrators, who would be responsible for implementing Huawei Cloud projects with companies.

EDGE

At present, WDC has 20 edge datacenters that it claims to have built and that were leased to providers. These are sites or buildings that usually have up to 20 racks.

Now, in addition to creating more of these sites, WDC wants to connect some of these structures to public clouds, starting with Huawei.

In addition to the links it has established with Huawei, another factor in favor of this initiative is prices, according to the executive. 

Huawei's cloud solutions are cheaper than those of AWS, for example, and price has strong appeal among small carriers.

One of the latest projects developed by WDC involved an edge datacenter in Amazonas state capital Manaus, a place where there is limited access to public cloud solutions.

Behind all this, according to Rigatieri, is a strategy to help diversify the business of small providers with value-added services that go beyond pure residential connectivity and target the B2B segment.

“The ISP that leases our datacenter, installed its infrastructure, it isn't selling services. What we want to do is connect it to a cloud so it can offer this as a service to its corporate end-customer,” he said.

In Latin America, Huawei has three main cloud regions, in Chile, Brazil and Mexico, and two country regions, in Argentina and Peru. These five regions comprise nine availability zones.

Each zone contains one or more physical datacenters. In the case of Huawei, they usually comprise three sites, which is key for redundancy, backup and latency purposes.

Huawei is expanding its Brazil cloud region and was planning to open a third availability zone this year. 

“In Latin America, Huawei Cloud is the cloud service provider with the most nodes (connectivity spots) in the region. Huawei Cloud promotes the digital transformation of thousands of local customers in industries such as finance, media, retail, logistics, and internet,” the company said in a report last year.