According to Harvard Business Review, South Korea is one of the leading countries in the world for technology innovation, and it’s among the top producers of new data.1 Technology is so ingrained in the national identity that it launched a “Digital New Deal” to lay the foundation for a digital economy that will facilitate growth and innovation, according to PR Newswire.2
Even so, like many countries and industries, South Korea struggles to efficiently use the data it produces. The Data Dam, a central component of the Digital New Deal, aims to address this challenge by promoting innovation in the collection and processing of public and private data across industries—biotechnology, manufacturing, medical, finance, and more—and by standardizing the data for easier analysis. The goal is to create a smarter AI system that can help South Korea manage its large volume of data and use it to achieve insights that can further drive innovation.
Getting maximum value from data is a challenge familiar to SK Inc. C&C, a Korean conglomerate and leading advanced information and communications technology (ICT) company. The company’s modern digital platform supports one-stop development of AI, big data, and cloud-based digital systems and services for customers. These systems rely on consistent, accessible, clean data to produce insights that power good decisions and new ideas.
To help its customers unlock the full potential of their data, SK Inc. C&C is partnering with Snowflake and is the first company in the Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) region to join the Powered by Snowflake program. To power its digital platform, SK Inc. C&C is leveraging the near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance of the Snowflake Data Cloud. Data is freed from silos and stored in a central, unified location, enabling easier access and faster insights that lead to more-informed decisions and better customer experiences.
The powerful combined capabilities of Snowflake’s Data Cloud and the SK Inc. C&C digital platform will enable SK Inc. C&C customers to supercharge their use of data across their organizations—helping them to strategically align their cloud and data strategies with business priorities, improve accessibility of data insights, and build economic efficiencies over time. Data collection, processing, storage, extraction, and analysis functions can now be accessed on a single platform with just a few clicks. And with Snowflake’s consumption-based pricing model, cost is based on actual customer usage.
“Korea is an extremely fast-moving country from a technology perspective,” said Snowflake Sales Engineer Louis Lee. “So they are very data hungry and they’re producing a lot of data because they have the fastest internet infrastructure in the world.”3
The global increase in data has proven to be as much a challenge as a benefit. Snowflake’s Data Cloud and SK Inc. C&C’s digital platform will allow users to overcome the former and take advantage of the latter.
“Snowflake’s platform will allow SK Inc. C&C to break apart the silo that keeps data within the company and enable it to share data with its subsidiaries, partners, and customers,” said Lee. “I’m really excited about data-sharing opportunities in Korea as a whole.”
Snowflake’s President, APJ, Jon Robertson, stresses how deeply the partnership will supercharge the advancement of the industry.
“SK Inc. C&C’s leading digital software-as-a-service platform, powered by the Snowflake Data Cloud, can help Korean organizations more easily and quickly harness their data as they innovate for the future,” said Robertson.
“We will try to make it possible for any company to build its own data lake at any time without any burden and try faster and more-diverse digital transformations,” said SK Inc. C&C’s General Manager of Digital Platform Business and Executive Vice-President, Ki-yeol Lee.
The two companies plan to first target the finance, gaming, advertising, media, and medical industries, which require fast analysis of customer responses that, in turn, require collecting, storing, and processing data in real time to create rapid business results. Together, SK Inc. C&C and Snowflake intend to provide a differentiated solution that can help SK Inc. C&C unlock the value of data across its subsidiaries, business ecosystems, and geographies to empower creativity and innovation.