Hancom to lose government office monopoly

By Kim Tong-hyung

Staff reporter

Hancom, a survivor of the country's decimated computer software industry, could be struck a fatal blow as lawmakers are considering removing the company's privilege as the sole provider of government office applications.

The government and other public sector clients represent the core of Hancom's business, but there have been growing complaints over its ubiquitous word processor program, ``Hangul'' (HWP), which is incompatible with products from other companies.

The National Assembly Research Service (NARS), a parliamentary unit that provides policy research and analysis for legislators, now claims that government organizations should be required to use software products that support open standards. The idea is to eventually allow government documents to be created, read and edited by a wider variety of office applications run on any type of computer operating system, NARS said.

Hancom's murky business future appears to have motivated NARS's stance, as the company is now on sale again, just a year after Celrun H, the majority shareholder of personal computer maker, Trigem Computer, snatched it off the shelves. Hancom's next owner will be its ninth since the company's founding in 1990.

``It's critical that government documents are preserved and available for access for a long period of time, and it's dangerous for this to solely hang on Hancom's existence as a business,'' said a NARS official.

``The closed nature of HWP also brings inconvenience when collaborating with people in other countries and producing documents. The government has been virtually mandating the use of HWP, and this has hurt market competition as well as technology neutrality.''

NARS soon plans to release an official report to suggest all electronic government documents, including word processed documents, spreadsheets, charts and presentations, be represented by software designed in open document format (ODF), the global industry standard for open file styles.

The proposed changes would certainly make life easier for public servants, who had to use HWP for creating word-processing documents while separately using Microsoft products for spreadsheets and presentation files. And it's difficult for them to access HWP files overseas unless they take their laptops along.

ODF, which was established as an international standard in 2006, is aimed at enhancing the Web accessibility of documents.

It wasn't until last year that Hancom started supporting ODF for its office applications, and much of the software used at government offices are older versions of HWP, making it harder for search engines to detect the content.

It remains to be seen how the changes will rattle Hancom's business. Despite the circus-like atmosphere at the management helm, the company has remained resilient, posting revenue of 48.7 billion won (about $40.8 million) and a record operating profit of 15.2 billion won last year, its seventh consecutive year in the black.

However, no one would doubt that Hancom has benefited greatly from the elimination of competition in the government software market, and the reputation for its products among regular consumers has not exactly been generous.

Even should the government opt for open file styles, some observers say that Hancom's presence isn't likely to decline quickly at least for the next few years. Government organizations have been producing HWP files for over a decade, and most of these documents can't be read or edited by other ODF-based software or Microsoft products that are more widely used, which assures that public servants wouldn't be looking to discard Hancom products quickly.

``ODF is supported on Hancom Office 2010, which was released last year, and this puts us in an ideal position in the new race. We don't see our share declining sharply, although we will complete head-on with companies like Microsoft and other software makers,'' said a Hancom spokesman.