Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 104

Hyperconnectivity, Big-Data, and Real-Time Analytics,” written by two
executives with the software company SAS, and “Harnessing the Power of
Big Data in Real Time through In-Memory Technology and Analytics,”
produced by the software and cloud-computing irm SAP.
Although the report contains work by people from different professions,
there is little doubt that it speaks with an overwhelmingly corporate voice.
With no work from the large community of non-governmental organiza-
tions in the global IT sector, there is also little doubt about whose voice is
silent. Accentuating the corporate stamp is the collaboration between the
Forum and INSEAD, a global business school with campuses in France,
Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. It is arguably even more interesting that the
full report is sponsored by the Chinese irm Huawei, a world leader in
electronics and, some would say, a corporate leader in controversy. In 2012
the company surpassed Ericsson as the world's largest telecommunications-
equipment maker and leaped over Nokia and RIM to become, after Apple
and Samsung, the third largest producer of smartphones in the world. The
company manufactures for markets around the world but has beneited
from the explosion in smartphone use across China particularly because,
unlike Apple and Samsung, Huawei produces inexpensive devices. But
make no mistake about it: Huawei's reputation for low-cost devices does
not make it a low-end irm. In fact, half of its worldwide labor force is
involved in research and development, employed at some twenty research
and development institutes around the world. Partly because of its com-
manding position in global electronics production and partly because the
company has rapidly become a dominant force in leading-edge research,
Huawei has attracted widespread attention, but not all of it is good.
In 2012 the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
charged that Huawei, along with another Chinese telecommunications
irm, served as an intelligence front for the Chinese government and its
military “that could undermine core U.S. national-security interests”
(Rogers and Ruppersberger 2012, vi). Not everyone in the United States
agreed with the House report, citing the lack of strong, direct evidence
(Mathias 2012). Nevertheless, the charges spread and other governments,
including the Australian and Canadian, raised serious concerns about Hua-
wei and banned the company from bidding on critical government infra-
structure projects (Marlow 2013). In this context, the WEF report gains
further importance because it enabled Huawei to launder its reputation as