Huawei has made another move to bolster its international expansion strategy by naming John Suffolk, the UK Government's former CIO, as its new global cybersecurity officer.
Reporting directly to Huawei's CEO Ren Zhengfei at the vendor's Shenzhen headquarters, Suffolk will start in his new role on Oct. 1.
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Former UK CIO John Suffolk will take on global cybersecurity at Huawei. |
Suffolk's main task will be to overhaul the vendor's cybersecurity systems. This system will be used by all of Huawei's global business groups and across all departments including R&D, supply chain, marketing and sales, project delivery and technical service.
Hiring key executives outside of its homeland China region has been an ongoing trend taking place inside Huawei. Two key international executive hires include former Williams Communications and BT (NYSE: BT) executive Matt Bross as CTO in 2009. Later, Huawei hired ex-Nortel CTO John Roese as senior VP of Huawei North America R&D.
While Huawei continues to strive in its native China homeland, the vendor has struggled to make inroads into some markets, particularly the United States, due to national security issues related to Zhengfei's connection with the Chinese military as a former People's Liberation Army officer.
These concerns drove the Chinese vendor earlier this year to drop its proposed acquisition of cloud software provider 3Leaf, while Sprint (NYSE: S) decided to block Huawei and ZTE from securing a spot on its network modernization project.
For more:
- see the release
- Reuters has this article
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