Huawei, the Chinese hardware giant, might enter the cloud computing space, or so thinks Gartner analyst and Research VP Lydia Leong according to The Diplomat.
According to the analyst, Huawei will be developing an Infrastructure as a service system similar to the one proposed by Microsoft and Amazon, the well known Azure and EC2 systems.
If the information turns out to be true, we can easily expect Huawei to apply its business model to the cloud space, with the lowest prices it can manage to accept.
Companies considering cloud services are already under heavy pressure regarding Service Levels, and a Chinese based provider might be strongly biased when considering data security. However, Huawei might have other markets in mind as well: Cloud Computing has been identified by the Chinese government as a priority and strategic goal, and has been put under the control of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (the same entity controlling weapons research and production).
The Chinese government already created the Cloud Valley, a large industrial area dedicated to companies focusing in cloud technologies: while it seems unlikely that a price-driven acquisition model for cloud computing services can be successfull in Europe, should China enter the market the competition would without any doubt shift more and more on advanced features and reliability of the service.