As China's leading software and IT service provider with 100+ branches around the world and 70,000+ employees, iSoftStone is a flagship corporation that has braved the wind and waved to sail forward steadily over the past decade, and sustained its robustness despite the impact of pandemic.

 Huawei Cloud and B.P. (Business Partner) recently interviewed Huang Ying, Executive Vice President and Chief HR Officer of iSoftStone, who explained the prime mover for the sustainable and accelerating development of this giant company.

Bucking the trend during pandemic

The rampant pandemic in 2020 was a heavy strike on human life and health and the world economy. As an enterprise with a global layout, iSoftStone suffered a huge impact too. Nevertheless, iSoftStone's operating revenue in 2020 had a year-on-year increase of 20 percent, and the number of industrial head clients kept proliferating.

In this regard, Huang Ying explained that the successful resistance of crisis should be attributed to the BCM (Business Continuity Management) mechanism that plays a significant role during the pandemic period. Thanks to the capacity building and reinforcement of the vendor development plan and capacity building plan over the past years, the mechanism helps mitigate the impact of sudden incidents on service continuity as far as possible.

After the outbreak of COVID-19, provided that the employees' health and safety were guaranteed, iSoftStone made concerted efforts with the government, customers and internal organizations to fight against the pandemic and actively resumed production. The company focused on two major businesses i.e. the software and digital technology service and the digital operation service, and adopted six major measures to effectively sustain the stable annual growth of overall business.

First, iSoftStone upholds the customer-centered and key account strategy, connects and coordinates the service capabilities of consultancy, solution, cloud intelligence, IT infrastructure, etc. and creates value for customers in a sustainable manner.

Second, iSoftStone concentrates on two core businesses, enhances the integrated service competency including project and process management, quality of deliverables, internal control, security and compliance, resource management, and keeps improving customer experience and satisfaction.

Third, iSoftStone enables organization growth, carries forward the striver-oriented and value-oriented philosophy, targets at building a flexible organization, standardizes the organizational structure and core management platform, and achieves vertical alignment, horizontal connectivity and profound coordination.

Fourth, iSoftStone focuses on the central corporate strategy of excellent operation, and consolidates the excellence of operation and management.

Fifth, iSoftStone launches the city strategy and elaborately incubates the regional markets. The company has established seven major bases in China i.e. Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Xi'an, Wuhan, Chengdu and Shenzhen to serve customer needs as closely as possible.

Sixth, iSoftStone attaches importance to branding efforts for expanding influence. In 2020, the company was listed among the top 20 of the top 100 enterprises of software and IT competitiveness as well as one of the most influential enterprises of digitalization and among the top 10 innovation software enterprises in China.

Two earmarks of "digitalization" and "Huawei"

When mentioning iSoftStone, industrial insiders always tell a few key words, among which "digitalization" and "Huawei" are the most prominent and distinctive earmarks.

Recalling iSoftStone's history of development, Huang Ying said the company began to make a name by financial solutions, and later maintained a strong growth trend by close partnership with Huawei for over a decade.

Now iSoftStone has grown into a leading enterprise of software and IT service with competitive advantages in the sectors of finance, communication, education, transportation, logistics, retail, energy, operator, etc., becoming a rare resource of digital solution provider popular among the ICT head enterprises.

In the financial industry, iSoftStone has, on the basis of deep understanding of client needs, extended business reach to all aspects of pan-finance e.g. banking, insurance, securities, Internet finance and corporate finance. It works with Huawei to develop a solution for core insurance business system that solves the issues of inefficient online service, weak function and poor user experience of the traditional underwriting business, and expedites the digital transformation of insurance clients. So far the solution has been extensively applied in many insurance companies.

In the education industry, iSoftStone offers the Huawei-cloud-based solution of integrated educational affairs management system for universities that solves the issues like inflexible training mode, low efficiency of arranging courses, poor data quality and unavailability of course selection service in the era of education informatization 2.0. Based on the campus hybrid cloud platform, the system integrates applications and data to create "one platform with six major capabilities" that breaks the deep-rooted bottlenecks and significantly improves education quality and comprehensive management ability. So far the solution has been successfully applied in some domestic key universities.

ISoftStone and Huawei are strategic partners with expanding cooperation that both play a significant role in their respective developing ecology. The corporate cultures of these two companies echo each other by "taking customers as the center, taking strivers as the foundation".

Such alignment can be dated back to 2001. Through constantly improving the service management system and the deliverables of premium quality, iSoftStone now provides all-round services to the production lines of Huawei, and the business coverage extends from single IT service to integrated services, products and solutions, Huawei Cloud and ecology. During this process, iSoftStone has always aligned its strategy with Huawei. Based on big data, IoT, enterprise service and other fields, these two companies conduct multi-dimensional and in-depth collaborations in business opportunities, business exploration, professional service, etc. to jointly provide clients with valuable digital services.

"ISoftStone's strategy is in fact a growth strategy", this is the most frequent comment of Mr. Liu Tianwen, Chairman of iSoftStone Group.

Only growth can create value for the society and clients and bring returns to the enterprise and employees. "It's like rowing upstream in this industry. Move forward, or you fall behind. So we must keep moving," said Huang Ying.

ISoftStone started by developing internal financial systems for large enterprises and now covers all aspects of digital services for the whole industry. Guided by the entrepreneurship of Chairman Liu Tianwen, the company is on a track of steady and fast development.

During this process, iSoftStone is quite confident about each strategic decision, which should be attributed to its insight of industry and market situation, the perseverance and dedication of digital transformation and development, and the unswerving partnership with Huawei.

As mentioned in the interview, cloud computing leapfrogged ahead over the past decade. Driven by the wave of digitalization, the "cloud first" strategy is shifting from the Internet sector and permeating the traditional sectors like government affairs, finance, transportation, logistics, education and industry that ushers in a new development stage. In the context of digital economy with epidemic impact and new infrastructure progress, cloud has become an inevitable choice for digital transformation of enterprises. More enterprises integrate their business capabilities with cloud, with a stride from On Cloud to In Cloud to develop all-scenario businesses based on cloud technology architecture.

Over the past few years, Huawei Cloud experienced rapid development under clear orientation and strategy, created open ecology and deeply integrated with more developers of vertical segments. Embracing Huawei Cloud complies with the need of cooperation and the need of the era of digital economy that contributes to iSoftStone's sustainable development. The company will be quickly integrated into the partner system of Huawei Cloud featuring openness, cooperation and win-win effect, allocate more resources to partner competency center and elite service provider plan, unswervingly work with Huawei on innovation, and further diversify the ecology of Huawei Cloud.

Huawei Cloud offers a reliable and efficient platform for iSoftStone's all-round cloud transformation and enterprises' digital transformation. At present, iSoftStone has realized its all-round cloud transformation on Huawei Cloud including cloud-based websites, products and solutions, programs, OA and core systems. Meanwhile they jointly help a number of large enterprises complete cloud transformation:

In the cross-cloud migration project of ABB and Buhler IoT platforms, iSoftStone relied on Huawei Cloud to provide technical services like cloud planning, scheme design, whole-process cloud security assessment, threat modeling, code detection and security service. The applications and services successfully migrated to Huawei Cloud and reduced the maintenance cost by 30 percent