Huawei Technologies Co is accelerating digitalization in a wide range of sectors through its latest cloud computing and artificial intelligence technologies, the company said on Thursday after kicking off the Huawei Connect conference.

Zhang Pingan, CEO of Huawei Cloud, a unit of Huawei, said:"Digitalization offers a wealth of opportunities, and we call on all to think cloud-native, act cloud-native. Let's dive into digital and into the potential of 'Everything as a Service'."

In industry parlance, Everything (or Anything) as a Service goes by the abbreviation XaaS.

Zhang's comments summed up Huawei Cloud's unveiling on Thursday of the industry's first distributed cloud-native service called Huawei Cloud UCS. UCS stands for "ubiquitous cloud-native service".

With the new service, Huawei wants to provide organizations with a consistent experience while using cloud-native applications that are not constrained by geographical, cross-cloud, or traffic limitations, said Xu Zhijun, rotating chairman of Huawei, at the conference.

Huawei Cloud said it has brought together more than 2.3 million developers, 14,000 consulting partners, and 6,000 technology partners in the past four years, and it has also made more than 4,500 services available in the Huawei Cloud Marketplace, an online platform.

Huawei Cloud and its partners currently operate 61 availability zones in 27 geographic regions worldwide, covering more than 170 countries and regions.

Data from Gartner showed that Huawei Cloud is now one of the top two cloud service providers in China, and among the top five globally.

Huawei Cloud is now working with partners toward a global cloud alliance, giving customers and partners access to cloud resources with a single account, interface and invoice.

Christophe Ozer, head of Orange Cloud (Orange Flexible Engine) Asia-Pacific region, shared his experience with Huawei Cloud in helping customers develop globally. He said, "From Asia-Pacific to Europe, we provide one network and one cloud for data interconnection and global innovation."

Xu said the COVID-19 pandemic and the proactive global response to carbon emissions and global warming have accelerated the digitalization of products and services over the last two years.

According to market research company McKinsey, the pandemic has advanced moves for digital transformation by seven years globally and by a full 10 years in Asia-Pacific.

Henrique Cecci, senior research director at market research company Gartner, said:"The economic, organizational and societal impact of the pandemic will continue to serve as a catalyst for digital innovation and adoption of cloud services. This is especially true for use cases such as collaboration, remote work and new digital services to support a hybrid workforce."

Meanwhile, the increasingly complex global environment has caused companies to place greater strategic priority on business resilience, for which digital technology is a key enabler, Xu said.

The development of the underlying digital technology and infrastructure has laid a solid foundation for digital transformation. Globally, there are already 176 5G commercial networks and more than 10,000 projects exploring how 5G can drive industrial digitalization. On the consumer front, there are already more than 490 million 5G users worldwide.

According to International Data Group, 81 percent of organizations worldwide are already using cloud or have applications in the cloud.