Huawei has a lot of penetration in one of the accounts that's called a Higher Education Commission, which is basically the governing body for about two to 300 universities in Pakistan. A higher education commission was actually planning on having the account services for these universities because of which they bought a lot of worthy hardware.
Now they're planning to expand the current data center, which is in Islamabad to two other regions that are in Karachi. Huawei is really into that account along with a lot of others. OceanStor is definitely one of those products that we sold to higher education as well with a couple of other places.
Huawei has a lot of penetration into accounts in Islamabad and the whole region, especially in Islamabad, because this is where our capital is, this is where most of the government offices are.
They have a really nice marketing team that keeps on promoting all of their successes over various platforms. They are relatively cheaper when it comes to cloud services but they have a few weaknesses at the same time. IBM has AI tools and they have IBM Watson and Huawei doesn't.
If you compare our deployment team from IBM versus our technical team from Huawei, with IBM we have five people, and for Huawei, we have 20 people. There is a major difference because you're getting more business from Huawei compared to IBM.
We have a separate team for administration, installation, configuration, storage, and cloud.
It is an expensive product. They should lower the price.
We might just be taking the decision of replacing Huawei and concentrating more on Oracle.
We have been selling OceanStor for about two years now.
Considering the penetration that they have in the market, I would recommend Huawei.
I would rate it a five out of ten.
When we sell Huawei to our customers, they always have some support issues, probably because of the language barrier. They do have a product roadmap and they know that they'll be bringing in a new feature set in the next two months or three months and they would pitch that feature initially. Later on, they would tell the customer that it's coming in a month or in a few weeks.
There are a lot of part replacements that take place for Huawei compared to IBM. I've seen a lot of cases where, when you sell a product within the first six months, we need to replace either their discs or something because they start malfunctioning. We rely a lot on the support and their backup hardware.
Huawei plus has a better pricing plan but the negative is the language barrier. There is also an overcommitment in terms of features that are not exactly there, but they will be added sometime in the future.
We usually have to do a steel replacement. We have to do part replacements. Then we have to engage our support team as well, to make sure that we can handle the customers and their problems.
