Huawei Soars in Airport Partnerships: IATA

TRAVEL Esquire ✈️
4 min readMar 30, 2018
Yuan Xilin, President of the Transportation Sector of Huawei Enterprise Business Group

A faculty member at the Rutgers University School of Business Executive Programs, Glen Gilmore is an instructor, among other topics, of Emerging Technologies in Supply Chain Management. An avid traveler, he is also known as “Travel Esquire”, sharing his journeys across the globe in the social space, from Twitter to Instagram. A Huawei Key Opinion Leader (KOL) and Business Partner, the thoughts expressed here are entirely his own.

Huawei Puts Passengers First, Becomes IATA Strategic Partner

The world’s largest telecommunications company, Huawei, is helping put passengers first in aviation by providing vital digital transformation services and products that let airports and airlines devote more attention to their customers. At the 2018 Passenger Terminal EXPO in Stockholm, Huawei announced its new strategic partnership with IATA (International Air Transport Association), “the trade association for the world’s airlines, representing some 280 airlines or 83% of total air traffic.”

As an IATA strategic partner, Huawei will participate globally in the development of new airline industry-wide policies and initiatives, collaborating with industry leaders to shape the future of aviation. As the world’s leading information and communications technology (ICT) company, Huawei, with its new partnership, is now particularly well-poised to deliver the digital transformation innovations needed to bring more seamless, secure and enjoyable customer experiences at airports internationally.

Assessments show that many of the world’s largest airports are already facing a critical need to improve and expand facilities and services.

IATA Report

When the world’s busiest airport wanted an upgrade for growth, it turned to Huawei

Dubai Airports (DXB) inspire awe in those who use it, both consumer and cargo clients. DXB has grown to become the world’s leading airport for international passengers and a leading hub for international freight. Annual passenger traffic to DXB is projected to reach 103.5 million by 2020, and 118 million by 2025.

Wanting to provide for its continued growth, DXB selected Huawei to create a new data center that could “consolidate the services of its legacy data centers and expand airport services.”

Dubai Airports chose Huawei’s prefabricated modular data centre solution. According to Huawei, its prefabricated solution offered “quick deployment, easy capacity expansion, energy conservation, and other important features.” Dubai’s extreme heat also presented a challenge that Huawei’s solutions were able to overcome.

23 Shipping Containers and 10 Months to Upgrade Completion!

Digital transformation is urgently needed throughout the aviation industry, observes Yuan Xilin, President of the Transportation Sector of Huawei Enterprise Business Group. “On the journey to digital aviation, it is a prevailing trend for enterprises to connect to [the] cloud, particularly hybrid cloud.” He noted that Huawei brings to the task of digital transformation “advanced ICT infrastructure to build an open, scalable, flexible and secure platform…” collaborating with “global partners to provide aviation customers with end-to-end digital transformation solutions.”

Huawei’s “smart” airport solutions connect airports from the terminal to the airfields.

Airports are ever-expanding mega-complexes where stakeholders require reliable solutions

Sprawling passenger portals. Complex shipping hubs. Gargantuan shopping and dining facilities. Millions of customers. A need for efficiency, personalization, comfort and security. In a digital age, these challenges demand agile, yet unified systems that can quickly allocate resources, anticipate problems, and deliver consistent quality services.

Huawei’s “smart airport” solution uses “cameras, sensors, and mobile terminals to form an “airport sensing layer”, providing ICT platforms that can cover an entire airport. This “sensing layer” helps airports leverage technologies to more seamlessly expedite passenger check-in and baggage processing and tracking, as well as provide predictive maintenance solutions inside and outside of terminals.

Safety is also “visualized with Huawei’s airport technologies. Huawei’s technologies include “intelligent video analysis” and “recognition technologies” that can automate proactive measures, such as “passenger behavior analysis, moving object detection, loitering detection, abandoned object detection/object removal detection, passenger density analysis, passenger flow analysis, and passenger number statistics.” This data, according to Huawei, can be used to enhance airport safety by aiding in “effective early warning, incident analysis and handling, and post-incident evidence collection and investigation.”

As a new IATA strategic partner, Huawei’s success in “delivering more than 50 aviation industry projects in 18 countries” can be expected to soar. Its demonstrated ability to speedily deliver and deploy end-to-end aviation solutions based on leading ICT technologies, coupled with its IATA strategic partnership, should be good news for the many airports needing to quickly and reliably expand and enhance services. Helping airlines and airports focus more on the comfort of their passengers should be the ultimate gain of expanded digital transformation in the aviation industry.

For more insights on digital transformation, connect with me on Twitter ~ GlenGilmore. And to join my journeys, connect with me on TravelEsquire!

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