'The Rise of Cloud services in Korea is Real'
Infraware CEO Kwak Min-cheol
By Kwak Min-cheol
Gartner, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and IDC (International Data Corporation) have highlighted cloud services as one of the top technology trends in recent years. A recent Gartner report shows that cloud computing will become the bulk of new IT spend by 2016.
It is obvious that cloud services are growing quickly; many organizations are adopting cloud services as the new foundation for their business models. Cloud services bring various benefits, including cutting infrastructure costs, enhancing mobility environment, as well as improving accessibility and business efficiency.
Infraware, a leading software service company with offices in Korea and Irvine, USA, is globally known for its main product, Polaris Office. Polaris Office Solution is currently embedded in 8 hundred million Android smartphones worldwide, such as Samsung, LG and HTC. The company recognized at an early stage the importance of cloud services and at the beginning of 2015, Infraware reorganized its major business unit to focus on cloud services.
Last April, Infraware released a cloud-based service of its core document editing solution, Polaris Office. Within eight months of release, cloud-based Polaris Office had surpassed 10 million subscribers. This is comparable to Evernote, which took three years to reach 10 million subscribers. This also represents the popularity of cloud services for convenience and utility as we enter the mobile era. As of March 2015, the number of subscribers reached 14 million, and the company aims to reach 60 million subscribers within the year.
It goes without saying the positive impact and contribution cloud services make on the working environment. Real-time document synchronization, one of the functions of cloud-based Polaris Office, enables editing documents anytime, anywhere through cloud storage. It also facilitates document sharing and collaborative work among multiple users and it is highly compatible as well, allowing for seamless viewing and editing across diverse document formats, including HWP, DOC, Excel, PPT and ODF files.
Against this evolving environment, it is truly exciting to see not only an industry-wide acceptance and application of cloud services, but to also see the positive endorsement of the government. The Korean government is now beginning to develop the cloud computing industry at the national level, by promoting the introduction of private cloud services into public institutions. Many IT industry officials say that this would vitalize the cloud services industry in Korea.
I hope this would be a strong foothold for Korean companies that are specialized in cloud services to not only grow and expand their business within Korea but also into the global market in the near future.