S Net Systems Inc., a South Korean company that engages in the provision of computer and information technology solutions, aims to play a leading role in helping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) build their own cloud system.

“We will stand at the forefront of building cloud systems for SMEs,”

S Net Systems Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairman Yoo Hong-jun told Maeil Business Newspaper in an interview on Thursday. “It is practically impossible for SMEs to hire information technology (IT) experts to build a cloud system on their own due to lack of funds and manpower. We will play the role of “partner” to help SMEs build their own efficient cloud system.”

S Net Systems is a leading systems integrator (SI) company in Korea that installs, distributes, and maintains IT equipment and software to SMEs. The company is currently focusing on expanding its cloud business as the trend of building corporate IT infrastructure has been evolving from directly building a system to utilizing external cloud servers and software due to the recent spread of telecommuting and remote work.

Yoo, an IT professional manager, joined Samsung SDS Co., a computer software arm of the country’s largest conglomerate Samsung Group, in 1985 and served as the heads of the company’s innovation business, smart factory business, and vice president. He joined S Net Systems at the end of 2021 and was appointed as CEO in March of last year.

S Net Systems succeeded in swinging to a profit last year, the first year of Yoo‘s appointment, posting a record 389.5 billion won ($297.03 million) in sales, up 21 percent from a year ago. In particular, its cloud business, which Yoo has focused on as a new growth driver for the company, contributed greatly to the turnaround, accounting for about 30 percent of total sales.

“Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure are well-known cloud computing platforms acting as vendors that provide IT infrastructure such as data centers and servers,” said Yoo. “S Net Systems, on the other hand, serves as a kind of ’intermediary‘ that consults, rebuilds, operates, and manages internal IT systems at SMEs so that they can utilize such cloud platforms well.”

Although its cloud system construction service for SMEs is in its early stages, S Net Systems is achieving tangible results. In 2022, it built an artificial intelligence (AI)-based energy management service using Google Cloud Platform for Taekyung SBC Co., a local high-tech material manufacturing company. The company was able to reduce the energy cost of its factory by up to 10 percent by introducing a cloud-based data analysis model, Yoo said.

S Net Systems also built an innovative manufacturing data center, a portable container-type data center, at the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Center, a research institute under Korea Electronics Technology Institute.

By Chung Ji-sung and Yoon Yeon-hae

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]