Technology giant Huawei has officially announced its plans to build one of the five major "clouds" that will power the future of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

Thought leaders, industry professionals, and analysts poured into Shanghai this month to witness Huawei unveil a stream of innovations — including its vision of cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies.

Huawei Connect, the annual conference in which thousands of representatives from more than 150 countries took part to explore the advancements in digital technology, served as the backdrop for the announcement.

With a commitment to spending $500 million over the next five years to support digital transformations around the world, Huawei’s enterprise service strategy aims to position the company as an industry cloud enabler across the public and private sector.

“Cloud is the most needed technology for governments and enterprises,” said Huawei’s rotating CEO, Guo Ping.

“Our business model is not to monetise user data. We do not develop applications or touch the data in our public clouds.”

Instead, the company is focusing on providing technologies and services that can help users monetise their own data.

Its growing presence in Pakistan also provides an opportunity for local enterprises to accelerate their cloud transformation ambitions, as well as develop indigenous technologies, through strategic partnerships.

Huawei is investing $250m in partner programmes, including $70m in co-marketing. The newly launched Solution Partner programme incorporates independent software and hardware vendors, systems integrators and consulting partners. The programme would provide the technical, marketing and sales resources in order to build, design and market Huawei-based solutions.

With the announcement of this expansion, the company unveiled a number of innovations that are designed to help enterprise partners through hardware, software, data services, enhanced connectivity and architecture and hybrid cloud technology.

A global push towards a more connected world is likely to result in a number of ‘Clouds’ developed by some of the largest technology companies in the world, with Huawei being one of the key players along with the likes of Amazon, IBM and Google, among others.

As developments in artificial intelligence make it more effective to utilise big data, we can expect some convergence between the different clouds, enabling a more centralised Cloud that has the ability to serve customers regardless of geographical limitations.

Huawei’s strategic investments in the public cloud domain are backed by "ambitions to provide long-term cloud services", as pointed out by CEO Ping during his keynote speech.

At the event, Microsoft and Huawei signed a Memorandum of Understanding for cloud services. As part of this agreement, Microsoft will develop a number of applications for Huawei Cloud with the aim to assist enterprises as they navigate through their digital transformations.

The demand for cloud solutions is expected to skyrocket by 2020 as more enterprises begin to adopt a cloud based solutions to help automate and speed up operational processes.