In conversation with Dr. Mohamed Madkour, VP of ICT Strategy at Huawei, as he shares insights on how Huawei is shaping ICT Talents across ME&CA region and important collaborations driving the initiative.
10 years of HUAWEI ICT Academy, how did it all start and how would you rate the achievements of the academy so far?
Huawei is way ahead with the talent strategy. The way Huawei sees the talents, especially the ICT talents – they are the lifeblood for any transformative story or journey of any organization or any country. We started taking this as a foundational strategy about 10 years ago here in the Middle East. Being a global ICT products and solutions provider, the way we look at ICT talents is that they are one of the reasons that we as Huawei, have a sustainable business also. So, from that, we established the ICT talents cultivation program with the Huawei ICT Academy. And when I talk about ICT talents, I am talking about the young students, the young talent within the universities that are collaborating with us. It’s about cultivating the talent and making them future ready from the word go.
We have extensive programs like the Huawei ICT Competition, Training the Trainers Curriculums. This is an entire program; an initiative designed to cultivate fresh talent and prepare them into future leaders with help at every step. It’s all about collaborations and the impact it can create. If we talk about just the Middle East and Central Asia, we have more than 260 academies. So, these are all results of the past decade where we gave it our all to, and for the ICT talents. Not just the students or universities, we are actually serving the vision of countries that are looking to nurture their talent. For example, Saudi Vision 2030, We the UAE 2031, Uzbekistan 2030, all of those are highlighting and underlining these strategies. We are all aligned and focused towards that single goal. Also, one of the unique things about Huawei is that we are not doing this alone, we have grabbed all of the ecosystem together and working in tandem with each of the stakeholders to make this a success. Naturally, it’s been an extremely successful program and initiative.
You mentioned, 2700 plus collaborations at universities across the globe, now in the next few years how do you see the growth happening on the collaboration part?
That’s a great question. So, you can do it both ways. You can do horizontally enhancing your coverage, but you can also do it vertically in terms of how the evolution, optimization and the adaptation paces out in the AI era. Because that’s fundamentally important. When you see the pace at which technology advances, you want to think how traditional talents can adapt to this era? And do we use the same traditional logic in cultivating talents that was here 10 years ago? So that tells you everything you need to change from that point of view. To be honest, currently, we are focusing on, first of all the evolution of the program to be able to really serve intelligence. And when I say intelligence, not just naked AI. I’m talking about intelligence that’s solving industrial problems that has intelligence under it. That’s the key. If you see, it’s actually a two-way bridge. We are looking for universities that also have the ambitions, who want to work with us. We focus regionally, our focus is to really look for these kinds of collaborations and then assigning resources, budgeting the program effectively. And again, as I said, we are serving the countries, it’s a way of giving back to the country by enhancing their ecosystem, educating the future leaders of these countries and enriching them.
To conclude, there are endless possibilities on how this ecosystem can grow and how we can expand our collaborations within local and regional markets to nurture the talents.
Huawei has been at the forefront of 5G Technology since these conversations began and you are already talking about 5G Advanced and the new mobile AI era. Can you elaborate a bit more on this?
Well, first of all, thank you for saying that we are at the forefront of the 5G technology because that’s evident from all of the support that we have. But let me tell you, we are at the forefront because we have our customers and countries, especially in the GCC areas, that want to be at the forefront of the technology. So, we are at the forefront because they are at the forefront. So it’s like a give and take. They have the passion that encourages us to support them with the most advanced technology.
As a matter of fact, we announced 2 weeks ago that the ME&CA is the first 5G Advanced region. Collectively we collaborated and it’s not just collaboration with partners but even with our competitors. That should tell you a lot about the way we work. Specifically, when it comes to 5G Advanced and AI, we believe that these 2 are essentially important at this point of time fundamentally to move us into another stage. And when I’m talking about another stage, I’m not really wanting to focus only on the speed, the speed is one part of it. But, we are looking at 5G Advanced as an enabler for the AI era because AI needs 5G Advanced to enhance the connectivity, as AI is going to be distributed everywhere and not just in 1 data center. And we believe that 5G Advanced also needs AI because 5G Advanced can be so complicated, you will need AI in automating the network, in making it more efficient as well as in reducing the power consumption.
I am really excited about the opportunities, especially in the GCC area and I can tell you that they champion the fixed wireless access. And for fixed wireless access, they need more data. Some of our customers really want to deploy 5G Advanced because 5G is not enough for the amount of data generated currently. So that’s one application that’s really obvious in the Middle East.
On the other hand, talking about industrial applications when it comes to, for example, in factories, you have different cameras sending in the uplink data. You cannot use 5G in there. We have all heard about ambitious projects coming up in GCC area like the flying taxi, drones etc. they all need low latency. So, we see the applications, we see the need for 5G Advanced coupled with AI. I think there’s tons of opportunities. And the good thing is that we have already started it and we have the collaborations in place with many carriers that have already launched 5G at least. So that’s a great news for all.
