Taking on Global IT Firms in Cloud Market
Naver has thrown down the gauntlet to global IT giants increasingly penetrating the South Korean cloud service market.
“South Korea has always been a test bed for new information technologies, which means competition has always been there,” said Park Won-ki, head of Naver Business Platform Corp. in a news conference at the company's data center on Mt. Gubong in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province. “It is our calling to protect data sovereignty.”
Naver’s sharpest competitive edge in the domestic cloud service market is the fact that it is a South Korean company. “We can provide technical assistance for customers in South Korea around the clock whereas companies such as Amazon and Google, which are headquartered abroad, have their own limitations in terms of communication and immediate response to problems,” the company explained.
Naver has refined its services to a highly competitive level, too. For example, Naver Business Platform, which entered the market two years ago, has increased the number of its services from 20 or so to 119 in 15 categories. Naver’s artificial intelligence-based services such as Clova and Papago are highly competitive as well. Also, the company has obtained 14 security certificates, outnumbering all of the other cloud service providers in South Korea.
Naver is planning to focus on public and financial services in particular. “We are more suitable than any other global company for the sectors handling sensitive customer information in that foreign companies cannot immediately respond to security problems,” it stressed, adding, “10 new public cloud services will be launched this month and a financial service will be unveiled in August.”
The company’s overseas market penetration is going well, too. At present, Naver Business Platform is setting up or operating data centers in the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Germany. It is going to open data centers in Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand as well.