[Interview Article] Oracle Korea leader says AI has 'real potential' for Korean companies
Oracle Korea leader
says AI has 'real potential' for Korean companies
BY LEE
JAE-LIM, Korea JoongAng Daily - Views
remain divided on the “AI bubble” — from skepticism to high optimism — but
Oracle is betting that its AI-powered analytics and management tools will be
able to meet the growing demands of its Korean enterprise customers. “This
year, Oracle Korea’s main objectives are
to accelerate the provision of integrated data and AI solutions and to support the cloud transition of key enterprise
systems,” said Oracle Korea Managing Director Kim Sung-ha said in a recent
interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at the tech giant's office in southern
Seoul. “The overarching goal is to continue to achieve double-digit revenue
growth annually, a trend that we have maintained over the past three years.” Kim
was appointed to head Oracle Korea in
January, taking over for Tom Song, its former managing director. Before taking
up his Oracle post, Kim headed the Korean division of Seattle-based data
analysis company Tableau, as well as domestic firms Freestyle Technology and
epapyrus. He also served in the marketing and sales divisions at Hyundai Motor,
Adobe, SAP and IBM. During
the first half of the 2024 fiscal year,
Oracle Korea's cloud division
reported a fourfold on-year increase in revenue from business with
conglomerates as well as 60 percent surge derived from dealings with
small-and-mid-sized enterprises and startups. Oracle's
shares spiked back in June when the company entered a three-way partnership
with Microsoft and OpenAI and announced that its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) would complement
Microsoft's Azure to handle complex AI
workloads as demand for ChatGPT continues to grow. Along this line, Oracle
hopes to add a yet-to-be-revealed Korean
AI startup to its roster of partners, although the two sides are still
mapping out the details of their collaboration. “We
are preparing to collaborate with domestic companies with proprietary large
language models [LLMs], where Oracle will provide the infrastructure and software needed. What this means is that we
can provide additional Korean language services using our Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and offer combined
solutions to our Korean clients.” Oracle
currently leverages LLMs from Cohere and Meta that can support more than 100
languages including Korean — but if this yet-unnamed domestic startup joins
Oracle, it would become the AI company
with the largest base of data in its mother tongue. Oracle
currently operates two data centers in Seoul and Chuncheon, Gangwon, which Kim
says is sufficient to handle the clients' growing demands as of now. “But
if the demand increases rapidly, we are prepared to expand our facilities in
close cooperation with our headquarters,” Kim said. “The two regions are
focused on public cloud services, but we
are also established dedicated regions for private cloud services — known as DRCC, or Dedicated
Region Cloud at Customer — domestically
as well.” Financial
firms have has been early adopters of
cloud technology due to their need for scalable, flexible and
cost-effective infrastructure and data security, but Kim forecasts that
e-commerce, game and health care players will be among Oracle's new clients in
Korea. “We
are gaining new customers in e-commerce and gaming, such as the case of Korean
game publisher Woncomz,” he said. “The company transitioned to Oracle from
another cloud company, and it reported a cost-saving rate of 75 percent. After
analyzing the costs, the company told us that Oracle offers the most affordable
network. Oracle provides a single pricing model globally, whereas other cloud service providers have different prices
for different regions. Many of our customers consider this global pricing consistency
one of Oracle’s key advantages.” In
health care, however, Kim foresees hurdles ahead. Korean hospitals and medical
facilities still remain conservative about potential leaks of their data. “Korea’s
health care system is relatively advanced compared to the U.S., which still has
some outdated electronic management systems, but there is still room for
improvement,” Kim observed. “Oracle’s foremost value lies in protecting our
clients’ data, but the trust and validation of such cloud-based solutions in Korea are still
evolving. Nevertheless, we have achieved significant achievements with two of
our domestic clients in the pharmaceutical sector, which we are to outline by
this fall.” Oracle,
a relative latecomer in the global cloud
industry compared to Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft, has
traditionally focused on its mainstay
database business. But the company now maintains that the era of
multicloud strategy has arrived, and it now aims to offer its enterprise
clients attractive cloud products that
can easily integrate with AI. Kim
projects that Oracle’s database and client networks, both of which have taken
decades to establish, will quickly gain firmer footholds. “Oracle’s
greatest strength lies in our extensive business-to-business experience. Since
its founding by Larry Ellison, Oracle has consistently focused on addressing
the needs and challenges of enterprises from various sectors […] In contrast,
our competitors have different origins: Some started by selling online books
and later became cloud providers, while
others began with office software and
expanded into cloud services. Oracle’s foundation, however, is built on
providing comprehensive business solutions from end to end, including enterprise resource planning, customer
relationship management and human capital management applications. This depth
of expertise and integrated approach is what makes Oracle uniquely strong.” Kim
also knocked away concerns that an AI
bubble is about to burst, claiming that the hyped technology can no longer be
merely identified as a passing trend or marketing buzzword. “Nvidia
chips made previously impossible tasks feasible, with real potential to impact
our daily lives,” he said. “However, when it comes to implementing AI for enterprises rather than for general
consumers, there are still various considerations to address, and that’s where
Oracle comes into the picture. We have spent decades working closely with our
customers to understand and develop their business processes. This experience
has given us deep insight into their major pain points, which is why I believe we
are well-positioned to address them.” Source:https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-08-10/business/industry/Oracle-director-says-AI-has-real-potential-for-Korean-companies/2109819
2024.08.14