Snowflake opens cloud computing service branch in Korea

Kang Hyoung-jun, right, the country manager of Snowflake Korea, poses with the company's sales engineer, Louis Lee, in this photo, provided by the firm, Wednesday. Courtesy of Snowflake Korea

By Baek Byung-yeul

U.S.-based cloud computing service company Snowflake has established a Korea branch to capitalize on the burgeoning data analytics market here.

Snowflake announced Wednesday that it has opened an office in Seoul and appointed Kang Hyoung-jun as the country manager. He will be responsible for heading the company's business development, sales and channels, as well as partnership engagements in Korea, the company added.

Snowflake became known in Korea after it was found to be on Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett's investment list. The company operates data cloud services where customers can store, organize, share and analyze their data.

Stating that Korea is one of the leading countries in the world when it comes to technological innovation as well as among the top producers of new data, Snowflake said that its customers will be able to gain a competitive advantage by breaking down and using data.

"Key industries in the Korean market, such as automotive, financial services, manufacturing, retail, and many more, can benefit from Snowflake's flexibility, concurrency and secure data sharing, and leverage the platform as the single source of truth for all of their data," Kang said during an online press conference. “I look forward to using my experience to help address the needs of the Korean market."

As part of its expansion plans in Korea, Snowflake is currently cooperating with SK C&C, an information technology arm of SK Group.

Lee Ki-yeol, the executive vice president and general manager of SK C&C's Digital Platform Business, said that the company is not only using Snowflake's platform as a customer, but also taking part in the U.S. firm's Powered by Snowflake program to accelerate the digital transformation.

Lee said that SK C&C began using Snowflake's service after learning of the many difficulties in processing large amounts of data.

“There were limitations in processing large-sized data. It was also too expensive to collect the data. Also we had problems with data processing speed,” Lee said.

“We conducted a pilot test of Snowflake's service at our media business affiliate and we found that there was a 70 percent improvement in the data processing speed and a 50 percent cost reduction, and this made us further strengthen our collaboration with Snowflake,” he added.