Pursuing Open Innovation with Global Firms

Kim Yong-seop, CEO of LG CNS, explains his company’s cloud strategy at WeWork Center in Seoul on March 22.

LG CNS CEO Kim Yong-seop unveiled the company’s new cloud business strategy at a press conference on March 22

"Companies that do not convert to cloud computing will lag behind their competitors," Kim said during his meeting with reporters at the Seoul WC Center. “LG CNS will employ ‘public cloud first strategy’ and carry out open innovation with top global companies such as Amazon Web Service (AWS) and small but strong domestic and foreign enterprises.”

LG CNS plans to provide “CloudXper,” a cloud management platform of its own development by integrating it with cloud infrastructure developed by AWS, Google and Microsoft. CloudXper is a compound word of "Cloud" and "Xper," which means “Expert.” It represents the company’s determination to lead customer business innovation. The service is scheduled to come out in the first half of this year.

The concept of this project is that LG CNS will use cloud infrastructure of big global companies, but operate its own cloud management platform. LG CNS will also provide a hybrid cloud service where the majority of clients’ general-purpose data is managed by public clouds of big global companies, while their sensitive information is managed by private clouds. The cloud infrastructure will be designed to use multi-cloud services by multiple companies including AWS, Google, and MS. This is an alternative to prevent a customer from being dependent too much on a specific cloud company. If a customer uses cloud infrastructure of one company only, the customer will be swayed by services and pricing policies of the company.

"LG CNS has collaborated with Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and partnered with five companies including Embotics of Canada, Megazone and Uengine, two small but strong companies of Korea," said Kim. "We aim to grow into one of the top three cloud SI companies by 2021."

LG CNS has decided to serve as a control tower to accelerate the digital innovation of LG Group affiliates. The company will change over 90% of IT systems of LG affiliates such as LG Electronics, LG Chem, and LG Display into cloud-based systems by 2023. More than 70% of them will be public cloud services. In particular, CloudXper will be used as a single platform for affiliates.

Market research firm Gartner predicts that the global public cloud service market will grow 17.3 percent year on year to US$202.6 billion in 2019.

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