Huawei looking to offer wider range of storage products

After last year's acquisition of U.S. computer security software company Symantec, China's Huawei Technologies is looking at offering a larger range of storage products to its customers. While best known for being a networking and telecommunications equipment supplier, rising growth rates in mobile and Internet data services has prompted the company to seriously look at entering those markets.

"Our business is changing, and our customers' needs are changing. We need to enter these markets," said Jeff Jiang, director of storage marketing at Huawei. Huawei and Symantec established a joint venture in 2008, but now Huawei will need to look at different ways to sell storage products without the Symantec brand, since an acquisition to buy out the rest of the joint venture was made earlier this year. The acquisition took place to better provide total solutions to Huawei customers so that networking, servers and storage systems could be bundled together.

Huawei added 1,000 staff to research and development of storage products this year and has plans to announce larger scale storage systems this September. The company's primary market has been China with an 11 percent market share, but the real challenge will be competing globally against major rivals like HP and IBM. In any case, improving the Huawei brand outside of China must be on the company to-do list.

[via PC World]