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Huawei's year-old enterprise division wants to put all of its business through the channel in three to five years, according to Jeff Hwong, the company's regional sales director for Southern Pacific Enterprise Business.

Huawei created the division to flesh out its business, which also deals direct with telcos and offers consumer-oriented products. Adding an enterprise business, Hwong said, makes sense as a growth strategy. Scaling down products engineered for telcos and their demanding environments is also a nicer position to be in than scaling them up for the enterprise.

It will not, however, insist on sales of its whole stack. Instead, the company is keen to partner with application vendors and specialist distributors and resellers in industries where a communications component is an important part of any solution.

A deal in Australia with an organisation called Telehealth Networks is illustrative of that approach, as it involves remote medical consultations using telepresence plus local networking with wired medical instruments like eletronic stethoscopes.

If Huawei is able to sell servers, storage and security appliances in this kind of arrangement it will happily do so, but Hwong was careful to say the company has no ambition to compete with integrated computing and storage stacks and will instead pursue this industry-centric model.

The Enterprise division's progress towards a 100 per cent channel model is at different stages around the world, Hwong said, but its model will see it recruit Master distributors, value-added distributors, industry-specific value-added partners plus more general resellers.

New partners won't be let loose on clients alone: Hwong said Huawei Enterprise has a “high touch plus value” approach whereby it does the initial heavy lifting and customer engagement, then brings partners in for execution. ®

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