Huawei announces switch to its in-house MetaERP - PingWest

Huawei announces switch to its in-house MetaERP

Huawei announces switch to its in-house MetaERP

5 hours ago

Chinese technology giant Huawei has announced the replacement of its legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with its self-developed MetaERP system. The news is not without forecast, as Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei announced that the company has completely replaced foreign operating systems, databases, compilers, and languages with its own and has developed the MetaERP management system on March 20, at a ceremony held in Shenzhen.

MetaERP is a cloud based enterprise resource planning system, fundamental to the company’s operations. With the system, Huawei has been gradually shifting its R&D to its own tools and has built a software development production line covering the entire software development process.

Huawei introduced the MRPII system in 1996 and later expanded to the ERP system with several iterative upgrades. The old ERP system was the core system underpinning Huawei's enterprise operations and rapid development for more than 20 years.

In May 2019, the U.S. Commerce Department added Huawei to a trade blacklist over alleged security concerns the company denies. The listing and several successive rounds of trade sanctions hobbled Huawei's ability to source items made with U.S. technology, which included the ERP tools it had been using from Oracle Corp. As a result, Huawei lost access to its old ERP system and other core operation and management systems since then.

The debacle propelled Huawei to develop its own ERP system, which is the MetaERP. The system is built with other Huawei systems like EulerOS and GaussDB, and is “cloud-native, future-oriented, ultra-large-scale.” MetaERP has already gone live, currently handling 100% of Huawei's business scenarios and 80% of its business volume, according to the company.

In addition to MetaERP, Huawei has been continuously releasing software and hardware development tools and services since December of last year. In total, the company has released 11 tools and services so far. Some of the tools that have been publicly released include CodeArts Req, a one-stop testing management platform called CodeArts TestPlan, a code check service named CodeArts Check, a distributed build system called CodeArts Build, an online IDE service called CodeArts IDE Online, a code hosting service called CodeArts Repo, an artifact repository service named CodeArts Artifact, a pipeline service called CodeArts Pipeline, and a deployment service named CodeArts Deploy.

Sabrina Wanzhou Meng, Huawei's Rotating Chairwoman and CFO, said, "We wouldn't have been able to build MetaERP without the support of our partners. Innovation is only possible with an open mind, and thriving is only possible when we work together."

Meng was referring to Huawei’s strategic partners such as Kingdee, Yonyou, Qi An Xin, who helped the company developed this core enterprise business system during the ERP switchover.

Notably, Ren Zhengfei’s previous speech foreshadowing the announcement of MetaERP had sent ripples through the market, causing the shares of several domestic ERP manufacturers including Kingdee and Yonyou to plummet on March 20.

Huawei's development of a homegrown ERP system comes at a time when Chinese companies are facing increased scrutiny and restrictions in the field, while China's high-end ERP domestication rate is relatively low, with foreign firms such as SAP and Oracle holding over 50% of the market share. In 2021, SAP has the highest market share of high-end ERP software in China, reaching 33%, followed by Oracle, reaching 20%, according to a report by Chinese research agency ‘Forward-The Economist’.