Chinese Entrepreneur Magazine: Why Huawei must open

Why does Huawei have to be open? Why does Huawei have to choose to be open?　　Can Huawei, who is accustomed to the closed model, adapt to this historic change? Many outsiders will be amazed at Huawei's recent upheaval: This January late May seem like an appointment, with several Huawei executives (MR, Xu, Ding, Chen Lifang, Yu, etc.) collectively on Sina Weibo.　　Soon thereafter, the Huawei Executive management team (EMT, Huawei's top management), senior Vice president Zhijun not only received an interview with reporters, but also made a public response to sensitive successor issues. This was unimaginable in the previous Huawei.　　The past Huawei has never been a good interview object, reporters often encounter the following scene: The company sent an interview outline, but for a long time without any reply; some reporters to the Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen still do not have its door, had to take a taxi in Sakamoto turn around. Even Huawei insiders have not adapted to this sudden change.　　Huawei Enterprise Business President Xu opened the microblog, a Huawei employee asked on the Internet whether it was himself and was confirmed, but still can't believe it is true. The way out lies in the openness behind these superficial phenomena is a major change in Huawei's strategy and organizational structure, a brand new Huawei may be ready to be. Before we analyze these changes, we need to look at the status quo of Huawei.　　Last year, Huawei became the world's second-largest telecoms device by making 28 billion of billions of dollars in sales, and Huawei may have become China's largest private company if compared with the 500-strong list of 2010 Chinese private companies. But Huawei, already possessed of an elephant-like size, finds itself growing heavier.　　The reason, Huawei has been faced with more and more serious contradictions. The first is the contradiction between business development and market saturation. In the past few years, Huawei in the telecom operators market has been a push, winning the world's top 50 operators in the 45, in China still maintain a leading position in the European market has taken the lead, the only drawback is that there has not been a major breakthrough in the U.S. market.　　But the global telecoms equipment market has largely stalled over the years, and Huawei, which has got 20% per cent of its market share, has been struggling to go further. Second, the old routine has not been able to adapt to the new business requirements. In order to sustain growth and achieve the goal of surpassing Ericsson and Cisco, Huawei has started to diversify, putting business and terminal business in the same position as the operator's business, and appointing Xu and Wan Yu "Jag" as heads of two big business units. However, these two big business models and Huawei's original business model is very different. Huawei in the operator market is a direct marketing model that can be customized for some of the big customers. In the corporate business market, Huawei is faced with tens of millions of customers, only to provide standardized products, and must be sold through channels. For another new business terminal, Huawei used to use resale mode, through the operator to completeinto sales, thus ignoring the ultimate consumer's real needs.　　The opposite is true of Apple and other terminals, which start with the needs and experiences of end consumers and guide operators through innovative products such as the iphone, gaining more power of speech and higher profit margins. Finally, there is the contradiction between the growing organization and the inefficiency. In the past, Huawei has been known for its strong executive power.　　However, as the number of employees broke through 100,000 people, the organization structure is increasingly complex, the efficiency of Huawei become more and more low, and, the more and more serious, the middle-level cadres decision-making ability is low, the response to the first line is more and more timely, so that Huawei President Ren has to come forward to call So what's the key to unlocking the contradictions that Huawei faces? The best key is to be open. In this respect, Huawei's "teacher" IBM is a good reference. Prior to the 1990 's, IBM had been a model of closed-end innovation, designing and manufacturing all of its products. But when the open architecture emerged, IBM was hit by a huge loss. In the middle of the 1990, IBM began the transition, retreating from basic research, peeling off the PC business and developing software technology and user-solution capabilities. More importantly, IBM is moving towards an open model: It starts to make the most of open technology standards, such as Linux and Java, to create value for itself, to classify the different components of the value chain, For example, sell 2.5-inch disk drives to Apple instead of being used for personal use as in the past; began selling technology and patent rights to other companies and earning a decent income; IBM also began to learn from customers, launching the "first category" project, working with leading customers to study and address commercially important, Academically interesting question. Within IBM, the concept of "global integration" has been gradually implemented, allocating the most appropriate resources to the most appropriate regions of the world, such as placing global sourcing centers in China, finance centers in Malaysia, and so on.　　It is because of the adoption of an open model, IBM finally back to the dead, rejuvenated youth. Similar scenes also appear in today's telecoms industry. In the past, the telecommunications industry is also known as a closed: the equipment manufacturers are based on their own platform to develop non-standard products, which also achieved a lock on the operator, thereby maintaining a high profit margin.　　Now, the telecoms industry is also happening in the same time as the PC industry: vertical integration and proprietary standard closed mode is broken, IP technology brings open and standardized products, telecom operators closed "walled garden" mode of operation is also advocated open and shared Internet model impact pieces. In the past, Huawei has relied on this closed model to develop and become the world's leading telecoms equipment provider.　　Now, the changes in the external environment forced Huawei to bid farewell to the closed, to open. Open Door Comprehensive look, Huawei's opening includes the followingAspect: The first is the opening of the business model. November 29, 2010, Huawei released its cloud computing strategy, which includes three elements: building a cloud computing platform, promoting resource sharing, efficiency and energy conservation, promoting business and application cloud, promoting the migration of various industries to cloud computing, opening up cooperation, and building a win-lose ecological chain.　　Unlike other previously released products and solutions, Huawei is trying to create an open cloud computing platform that will open the standard interface to millions of of developers worldwide and support them in developing a wide variety of cloud applications. This is the first time Huawei has learned to open the know-how, it is its own core technology platform and business platform, while the platform outside the application open to many partners, through the benefit-sharing mechanism to enlarge the market, and ultimately achieve greater commercial value.　　The world's leading IT companies, whether Microsoft, Intel, IBM or Google, have adopted the same platform open model; Huawei, who has been a follower, has tried to make a transition to the leader through an open strategy. At present, Huawei's cloud-opening strategy has begun to hit the ground. January 25, Huawei and the Shanghai municipal government signed the cloud Computing strategic Cooperation Agreement, will set up a global cloud computing joint Laboratory in Shanghai, build core technology research and development team of cloud computing, promote the development of Shanghai cloud computing industry chain.　　Huawei, meanwhile, has unveiled a similar cloud-opening strategy in North America, which will work with North America's leading partners to deliver solutions that will enable customers to expand their business offerings, reduce costs and bring telecommunications services to the clouds era. What matches the openness of the business model is the openness of the external image, which means that Huawei must simultaneously build an open ecosystem and attract a large number of partners to join Huawei's ecosystem.　　This time, Huawei must have a good external image.　　So, as early as a few years ago, for the overseas media and analysts Huawei has adopted a more open strategy: Huawei executives are not only frequently interviewed by overseas media, but Huawei holds annual overseas analyst meetings in Shenzhen to disclose to analysts the significant progress it has made over the past year, as well as important data on regional and product lines. However, in the past, Huawei's attitude towards the domestic media is still relatively closed. I remember 2005 when I went to Europe to interview Huawei and write "Huawei in Europe" report, after the Huawei responsible for media relations, the head also because of the opening of too much resources and was severely criticized. It was not until November 25, 2010 that Huawei, the president of Huawei, spoke for the first time in a symposium on improving its relationship with the media that "people who do media relations have to dare to speak, to say the wrong thing, and not to say anything in a way that doesn't make a media relationship."　　"Since then, Huawei's PR strategy has undergone a major shift, from resisting media interviews to actively communicating with the media, and even introducing popular SNS communication tools such as microblogs."　　A hindrance to openness? Of course, the openness of the business model and external image may cause a certain degree of confusion within Huawei because it is accustomed to the closed model of HuaweiIt is difficult for people to adapt to such a drastic change in the short term.　　As Ren said, in the past more than 20 years, Huawei has been like a lonely peasant walking out of the green gauze, walking on a zigzag field road, or Don Quixote, with Spears in his hands, accustomed to a single fight.　　With the open model, Huawei needs to work more with its partners externally, and from within Huawei needs to build more efficient organizational structures and processes. But Huawei's previous openness is clearly not enough. Huawei was hit hard by the Malaysian telecoms program in 2010. Huawei has become the first major supplier of telecommunications in Malaysia after it has won major projects such as NGN, FTTX, BRAS and IPTV. When customers expect Huawei to be its business partner and provide it with a full range of end-to-end solutions, Huawei has committed a "heavy product solutions, sales light delivery" of the chronic disease, the relevant departments of collaboration and communication also has a major problem, leading to the entire project has been a major delivery problem and caused a large number of complaints from end-users. Finally, in the case of unbearable, August 5, 2010, Malaysia Telecom CEO personally to Huawei chairman Yafang sent e-mail complaints. "From April onwards, we began to work with Huawei again to create a HSBB future." But unfortunately, in the past few months, Huawei's performance has not met my expectations for a major international company's professional standards.　　"The project has caused a lot of turbulence within Huawei, prompting Huawei to reflect on the lack of internal openness to meet the more complex needs of its customers," he said. Of course, this also reflects Huawei's human resources structure. In the words of Ren himself, "What does our company value in 20 years?" Focus on research and development, the market, do not pay attention to a balanced organization and management, the company will have so much. The limbic system has long been not cared for, the first 20 years we have gone, the next 20 years is to move towards balanced development.　　"Reflected in Huawei's human resources, is that Huawei is a lot of sales and research and development professionals, and lack of versatile generalists; it was for this reason that Huawei's project director was not able to communicate smoothly with the Malaysian Telecom project director, replacing five project directors within a year. In addition, with Huawei's continued success, some of Huawei's middle managers have a mindset that is not conducive to future development: a part of the middle class tends to be conservative, no longer seeking innovation and breakthroughs, and the problem is only mutual prevarication and self-preservation; and some of them feel good about themselves and think Huawei is the best of everything, Not willing to absorb external good ideas and talents.　　In recent years, although the company in the past year, the outstanding companies to absorb a large number of outstanding talent, but this less open corporate culture, so that newcomers can only engage in supporting work, the real development of the company to the role of the mainstay of the proportion is not high, and some even sink down. In the future, Huawei must also open up its governance as soon as possibleStructure。 Over the past more than 20 years, Huawei has set up a complete system of employee ownership, the company's shareholders to become the Huawei staff has greatly increased the centripetal force on Huawei. However, the shareholding system is not so transparent, nor can it completely eliminate the doubts of Huawei's internal staff. Outside, many Westerners are skeptical of Huawei. The author has communicated with a number of overseas analysts who have long followed Huawei, noting that the biggest impediment to Huawei's overseas expansion is the openness and opacity of its corporate governance structure, which has created a distrust of Huawei by Western governments and operators.　　In the future, Huawei, which remains open, will one day open its governance structure and eventually turn it into a real public company. A more open corporate governance structure will also help Huawei to successfully complete the handover from the first generation of entrepreneurs to the second generation of professional managers, thus establishing the genetic inheritance of Evergreen.　　Previously, Huawei's external and internal insight is generally more worried about Huawei's successor issue. It is said that Ren enjoys reading Kundera's immortal, which reads: "People are unequal to immortality." Little immortality and great immortality must be distinguished. The little immortality is the memory of a man who knows him, and the great immortality is the memory of a man who does not know the mind.　　"At this point, Ren may have understood that he is taking a more open mind and considering the succession for Huawei's inheritance." (the author is a veteran it observer, "one of Huawei's world Authors")