Huawei and SURFsara join forces for ICT innovation

Amsterdam - Huawei and SURFsara announce their strategic partnership for stimulating ICT-technology innovations in the fields of Smart Healthcare and Smart Energy that will benefit society and a sustainable economy. Today, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for this collaboration has been signed. The innovations in this partnership will be under the umbrella of the new SURF Open Innovation Lab.

Huawei will contribute to this partnership by providing expertise as well as cutting-edge technologies including next-generation cloud computing servers. SURFsara, as the national HPC & data services & expertise centre, is in the unique position to bring together the growing demands and challenges in the digitalization of research and education in The Netherlands, and the opportunities of deployment of new ICT-technologies for innovation.

The strategic partnership will combine Huawei's breakthroughs in ICT technology and SURFsara's knowledge of advanced and sustainable supercomputing and data infrastructure, to create an experimental environment for innovations in deep learning, Internet of Things, Big Data and HPC technologies with pilots in the areas of smart healthcare and smart energy. The joint experiments will be undertaken as a program in the SURF Open Innovation Lab.

In the SURF Open Innovation Lab, research and education organizations, technology providers, start-ups, industry and SURF will collaborate on technology assessment, prototyping, demonstrators and knowledge investments in key ICT-technology areas.

Prof. dr. Anwar Osseyran, CEO of SURFsara, says: ""This collaboration with a world leader in ICT will offer us the possibility to deploy the best of breed in technology in our open innovation lab and will enable the members of the SURF cooperative to increase the quality of education and research and develop with us innovative ICT solutions in the specific areas of smart health and smart energy"

Wonder Wang, CEO of Huawei Technologies Netherlands, says: "For the past 10 years, Huawei has invested yearly over 10 percent of its global revenue into R&D. Innovation is key to Huawei and this thrilling cooperation will maintain our leading position in ICT developments. SURFsara has unrivalled knowledge in the field of HPC and data infrastructure. By joining our expertise and innovation capability we are empowered to create new solutions that will equip the huge potential of HPC and big data."

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About Huawei
Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Our aim is to enrich life and improve efficiency through a better connected world, acting as a responsible corporate citizen, innovative enabler for the information society, and collaborative contributor to the industry. Driven by customer-centric innovation and open partnerships, Huawei has established an end-to-end ICT solutions portfolio that gives customers competitive advantages in telecom and enterprise networks, devices and cloud computing. Huawei's 170,000 employees worldwide are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers. Our innovative ICT solutions, products and services are used in more than 170 countries and regions, serving over one-third of the world's population. Founded in 1987, Huawei is a private company fully owned by its employees.


About SURFsara
SURFsara is the Dutch national High Performance Computing Center. It offers an integrated ICT research infrastructure and provides services in the areas of computing, data storage, visualization, cloud and e-Science support to academia and industry in The Netherlands. SURFsara, founded in 1971 as SARA, is a subsidiary of SURF, the collaborative ICT organization for Dutch education and research. SURF offers students, lecturers and scientists in the Netherlands access to the best possible internet and ICT facilities. For more information, visit www.surfsara.nl