China’s Huawei Technologies announced that it is switching from internal software management systems that it previously purchased from American vendors to its own internal version, celebrating the move as a victory over U.S. restrictions that once put the company’s survival in jeopardy.

The daughter of the company’s founder Ren Zhengfei, Meng Wanzhou, attended an internal event organized by Huawei on Thursday in Dongguan, south China, to mark the transition to its own “MetaERP” (enterprise resource planning system).

Companies utilize ERP software to control important business processes, from accounting to supply chain management.

“We were cut off from the old ERP system and other core operation and management systems three years ago,” said Tao Jingwen, a Huawei board member and president of its quality, business process and IT management department.

“Today we are proud to announce that we have broken through that blockade, we have survived!”

According to a news release from Huawei, the internal Meta-ERP has been implemented throughout 80% of the company’s operations.

Although Tao’s address was silent on Huawei’s plans to commercialize its ERP system and take on companies like Oracle and SAP, it offers a potential new revenue opportunity for the organization, which has been diversifying in an effort to survive under U.S. criticism.

The U.S. Commerce Department placed Huawei on a trade blacklist in May 2019 due to purported security issues, which the company rejects.

The listing and several trade sanctions that followed made it difficult for Huawei to source products using American technology.

According to a person with knowledge of the situation, it also disconnected it from servicing and patches for ERP tools that it had mostly acquired from Oracle Corp.

In his address, Tao stated that the cutoff was a “massive crisis” for Huawei because the outdated technology had been essential to the business’ operations for more than two decades.

“Not having access to ERP became Huawei’s ‘Dadu River’ that blocked our way forward and threatened our very existence,” Tao said, referring to a famous escape for China’s Red Army during the country’s civil war.

According to the source, Huawei’s “meta-ERP” system is a “cloud-native” solution that makes use of the company’s cloud computing platforms to operate more effectively than conventional ERP products.

The new system has been thoroughly tested and is processing 15 million lines of accounting entries per day, whereas the former system was like “a massive old building in disrepair,” according to Tao.

(Adapted from ThePrint.in)