ZTE targets $2b in cloud earnings

ZTE president Shi Lirong wants the firm to generate a third of its revenues from cloud computing within a year, as part of an aggressive push into the IT sector
 
The firm aims to generate $2 billion (€1.4 billion) in sales from cloud computing and related services in 2011, with datacom products, enterprise networks and servers and storage products for government networks high on its list of priorities.
 
Shi told the firm’s annual analyst conference in China it will also focus on cloud terminals and applications, in a move that should ramp up the proportion of revenues generated by the sector.
 
Senior vice president Wang Wei told the conference the push into cloud will also benefit the firm’s core telecoms business. ZTE will push telco’s traditional applications into the cloud to free up resources and maximize the efficiency of their back-end systems, and will develop new business services in conjunction with carriers.
 
Wang said the firm aims to become one of the top three providers of PaaS, SaaS and IaaS – fields research firm Gartner estimates will be worth roughly $91 billion in total this year.
 
The announcements round out ZTE’s strategy for 2011, coming just a few weeks after executive vice president He Shiyou told Telecoms Europe.net the firm will launch 30 new smartphones and tablets this year as devices become a major growth engine.