NEWS DEALS &WINS Huawei unveils potential “TikTok of ERP” with MetaERP

BY GIACOMO LEE

April saw Chinese tech giant Huawei unveil its own proprietary ERP system in the form of MetaERP, replacing the company’s original USA-provided provisions via Oracle. An awards ceremony marked the launch of the software, in the company’s innovation center Xi Liu Bei Po Village (Huawei Ox Horn Campus), based in the city of Dongguan. Photos from the awards show it taking place in front of the campus’s grand Europeanstyle architecture, arguably the perfect spot for the kind of Wes Anderson homage recently trending on unstoppably popular social media platform TikTok

Considering Huawei’s equally considerable stature, MetaERP could very well prove to be a TikTok-scale dragonslayer in the enterprise tech field. But as Huawei told ERP Today in its only international interview regarding the project, “without U.S. sanctions, Huawei had never considered developing its own ERP”.

When the U.S. added the Chinese brand to the Entity List in May 2019, the company found itself at risk of having the plug pulled on its entire worldwide business system. Since the late 1990s, Huawei’s major ERP considerations were provided by Oracle; the relationship between Huawei and Oracle, the latter of which declined to comment on the matter to ERP Today, was a strong one.

“[We have] been a loyal and one of the largest ERP users globally for decades, and we incorporated the system into most parts of the business,” as Huawei told us.

Within MetaERP is support for the major business processes Huawei carries out across its base of 207,000 employees in more than 170 countries and regions. The project involved several thousand working on what it has described as “the most extensive and complex transformation project” it’s ever undertaken.

According to Huawei, the metadata multi-tenant architecture is used to standardize metadata assets, using real-time intelligent technologies in order to make good use of data. “For example,” we were told, “multiple AI models are preset to achieve scientific and efficient risk control and operation decision-making”.

The tech here seems to surpass Oracle’s original considerations. But it might be more reasonable to assume it replaces all of the historical provisions from Oracle, which ERP Today was unable to determine at time of writing.

Huawei had already implied on launch that currently it has no plans to commercialize MetaERP. The reason why isn’t necessarily because of geopolitics or business reasons; as ERP Today learnt, it’s simply because of its precise nature as a solution: “MetaERP is only meant for Huawei internal usage”, said a company spokesperson.

Even if this wasn’t the case, U.S. Big Tech can probably rest easy for now. Industry research from China’s Tenba Group shows that SAP and Oracle lead in first and second positions in the country with over 50 percent combined share in the ERP market for larger enterprises.

Whether this picture will look the same in, say, 2033, only time will tell.