Huawei Cloud looking to win more contracts with big Brazilian banks

Huawei is looking to further expand its cloud presence with big Brazilian banks, in addition to advancing new projects with carriers, said Fernando Penna, director of new business at Huawei Cloud.

Speaking to journalists during the Brazilian edition of the company's annual cloud event in São Paulo, Penna told BNamericas that the company has more than 300 cloud customers in the country.

The majority of this base is concentrated in retail, as well as fintechs, e-commerce and, increasingly, government. 

These include UOL, Bis2Bis, Band TV, Moove, InfraCommerce, Creditas, Brazil’s agriculture ministry, the public defender’s office and Vivo Empresas.

On the other hand, Huawei Cloud still has a limited presence among large Brazilian financial institutions as opposed to US public cloud rivals AWS, Microsoft or Oracle.

Itaú Unibanco, the largest Brazilian retail bank, is an exception.

During the São Paulo event, for the first time details of a Huawei cloud project with the bank were provided. So far, Itaú's main cloud partner has been AWS.

Itaú Unibanco is using Huawei Cloud to automate its contact center and customer interaction operations, the bank’s superintendent of technology, Rodrigo Galdino said.

The focus is on contact center-as-a-service (CCAS). In this project, Itaú's data runs within the Huawei platform so that the bank can streamline and make better decisions in its customer interactions. 

“Conversations with Itaú [for cloud] began about two years ago,” said Penna. 

In 2010, Itaú hired AWS in a multi-year project for what was said to be one of the largest deals the US company has inked in Latin America.

In June, the bank’s CEO Milton Maluhy Filho admitted that Itaú was going multi-cloud, that is, adopting more than one public cloud provider. He did not give details, although it was known that the bank had started to rely on Oracle as well.

“We are using other clouds as well, in addition to AWS. We are doing specific tests, although our contract, our great partner, is AWS,” Maluhy Filho said at the time.

In May, the bank's IT director, Fábio Napoli, spoke at Oracle's annual cloud event in São Paulo, Oracle CloudWorld.

Galdino said at Huawei’s event that Itaú is going to the public cloud also to adopt generative AI. 

At present, around 70% of Itaú’s workloads are running in the cloud.

Despite still having a limited presence among large banks, Huawei Cloud's client base in the financial sector is growing and includes credit unions, insurance companies and fintechs. 

TELCOS

Among telcos, Huawei has as cloud clients the country's main operators, as well as internet service providers, said Penna. 

This segment is already a large client of the Chinese company's telecom hardware (antennas and networks), which facilitates the commercial engagement for cloud upselling.

But there were never disclosures of cloud projects with operators. 

During the event in São Paulo, the firm showcased a “Huawei TIM hyper-scale cloudification” initiative.

According to Huawei, the cloud migration tools and methodology for the project with the telco comprise 27 tools in seven categories and is focused on “centralizing and reducing O&M [operation and maintenance]."

In an interview with BNamericas last month, TIM’s CIO Auana Mattar updated the company’s cloud transformation push and said the telco completed on September 15 the migration of its online charging system (OCS) to the cloud.

The OCS is one of the most important elements in a telecom operator’s processes as it is a specialized communications function that allows it to charge a user for services in real time. 

At TIM, this system is provided by Huawei.

DATACENTER

To cope with the cloud growth, Huawei is expanding its Brazil cloud region with a third availability zone, with activation scheduled for the first quarter of 2024.

Yang Hua, president of Huawei Cloud Brasil, told BNamericas that this new site is completed. 

Huawei is now finalizing the technical details with the partner who built the datacenter, including commissioning and the installation of equipment and servers, Hua said.

Like the company's other Brazilian datacenters, the new site is located in São Paulo state, relatively more distant to its other structures. 

Huawei does not reveal who its datacenter partner is.

The expansion of the Brazilian datacenter footprint also comes as Huawei announces new products, both generative AI (PanGu) and an intelligent database for corporate services (GaussDB) for the country.