Chinese-based network equipment maker Huawei Technologies is finally starting to sell its enterprise line of switches, routers, Wi-Fi, storage and unified communications gear in Canada two years after being available in U.S.
For several years Huawei has sold telecom switching gear to carriers here including BCE Inc.’s Bell Canada, Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron, SaskTel and Wind Mobile. It also has a telecom research lab in Ottawa.
But it put off selling its enterprise line until this week, when it announced Capella Telecommunications of Peterborough, Ont. will be its Canadian distributor. (Editor’s note: After this story was published Huawei Canada said it also has distribution arrangements here with Synnex and CTDI, but they haven’t been announced yet.)
It is expected Huawei will leverage its Chinese manufacturing base to push traditional networking vendors like Cisco Systems Inc., Juniper Networks and Hewlett-Packard Co., particularly on pricing.
“We can deliver innovative product solutions at an attractive price point,” Darren Hamilton, Huawei Canada’s enterprise channel manager, said in an interview today. “We’re bring new dynamic to the marketplace in terms of price-performance and value.”
Asked by it’s taken so long for the company to sell to enterprises here, he said that “we’ve spent several months building a go-to market strategy, finalizing distribution, making sure we had the right programs, product mix. We’ve gone about it thoughtfully. It may seem like a long time but we’ve done everything correctly to be successful.”
Huawei may have been cautious because the Canadian market is small. On the other hand, by waiting it got caught last year in an uproar in the U.S. Congress on whether Huawei and China’s ZTE should be allowed to be carrier suppliers to American government networks because they are allegedly too close to the Chinese governments.
A House of Representatives intelligence committee said that “based on available classified and unclassified information, Huawei and ZTE cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems.
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