Suresh Reddy Vice President, Huawei Enterprise
How do you leverage the Channel power to grow your company?
Channel is very important for us. Look at any successful company, they never would  have grown or sustained without the Channel. Huawei understands this and the proof that 100 % of our enterprise business is only through Channel clearly explains this, except for some large projects that get structured through large operators. So we respect that, acknowledge that  and hence we want to improve and further grow this.
How is the Channel aligned for 2014?
 The agenda of the theme is – Connect, Build & Engage. We started our work before 6 months; identified specific partners who can really add value to the customers or to the portfolio. We started building capabilities within their organization and also learning a lot of things from them. As we move forward, we will engage more with customers. That is what we want to do the entire year and will see how it moves forward for us.
We have some strategic partnerships with whom we are building strong relationships as we move forward. One of them is Allied Digital that is based out of Mumbai. We are trying to look at the entire Huawei stack. Huawei is also looking at putting up an Experience centre with them and getting a lot of customer projects and POCs done there. Â Beetel is more of a networking and IP relationship which is very strategic in nature. Beetel being a large player, we are looking at it as a strategic partner. With Iris, we have a significant relationship and have just started off from a server and IT portfolio perse on distribution.
Any message to the Channel?
My only message is that - look at Huawei as a serious contender. If there are products and solutions that customers are looking for, Huawei is that best of breed products. Huawei has got the capability and capacity to do innovation for a customer’s specific need. We developed the product specifically for India called the Battery switch. Because of limited power supply in remote areas, our switch has come up with an inbuilt battery which gives a back-up for 8 hours. This is an innovation we did on customer’s requirement. Our Partners work with us, integrate and inform us what customers really want; we have the capability to innovate and build a particular product for them. Huawei’s key strength is R&D. we invest a little more than 10 % of revenues that comes to $ 40 million in R&D. We have 150,000 employees globally of which 70,000 employees are in R&D.
