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Huawei established its first cloud computing laboratory in the Philippines through a partnership with the Asia Pacific College (APC).

The P50-million (US$1.16 million) Huawei-APC Innovation Center housed at the APC campus showcases cloud technologies such as cloud desktop, cloud storage, virtualization and digital surveillance. It will enable collaborative projects in private cloud set up and configuration, smart and ubiquitous networking implementations, unified communication strategies and cloud-based applications development.

"Our commitment to our partners and end users is to bring this school to the cloud era. The center supports research and development projects for communications technology," Richard Yang, country manager, enterprise business group, Huawei Technologies Philippines, said at the inauguration on Wednesday.

The first output of the innovation laboratory is a 256-seat virtual desktop infrastructure now installed at APC, and now being tested for the installation of academic software for deployment in the coming school year. This replaces all physical desktops in all computer laboratories.

Through the center, Yang said Huawei would be able to provide a wider range of IT solutions to enterprise customers in different verticals such as government, public sector, business process outsourcing BPO, finance, electric power and energy, among others.

"More than that, we challenge you to test your innovation ideas on this platform, to raise new questions and new possibilities and make a real advance in technology," Yang said.

The APC, a private academic partnership between the SM Foundation and the IBM Philippines, has been recognized as a center of excellence in IT education by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED). In August 2011, it was designated as a learning center for Huawei products, enabling it to host technologies to all its digital and channel partners and channel. 

The training is not just for professionals but also for APC students going into the telecoms industry.

"In less than a year, we put up this innovation center to have our own private cloud, so that our students, faculty, industry friends and partners can come together and collaborate with Huawei experts bringing their products, enhancing them and giving us the runway to new solutions needed by the industry, people needed by the world," Ramon Yap-Dimacali, chairman of the board, Asia Pacific College.