Microsoft Korea held a press conference on 'Digital Transformation Summit' at Hotel Lotte World in Songpa-gu, Seoul on March 20, 2018.

Before ‘Digital Transformation Summit’ that was to be held on the same day, the press conference was organized to announce the content of a report “Unlocking the Economic Impact of Digital Transformation in Asia Pacific” on digital transformation and introduce the current status of domestic data centers that started operations in February, 2017. At the conference, the officials including Soon-dong Koh, CEO for Microsoft Korea, Andrea Della Mattea, President for Microsoft Asia Pacific, Eun-seon Han, Director for IDC Korea, attended.

“Digital Transformation has a positive and notable impact on the economy of the Asia-Pacific region, and many organizations in Asia-Pacific already feel the need to transform into a digital enterprise. Digital Transformation is now a reality, not a future, as it is believed that the actual benefits that companies enjoy with digital transformation now range from 15% to 18%.” – said Andrea Della Mattea, President for Microsoft Asia Pacific.

▲ Microsoft Korea’s 'Digital Transformation Summit' press conference was held.

According to the report, published jointly by Microsoft and IDC, digital transformations will increase Korea's gross domestic product (GDP) of about $42 billion by 2021 and the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 0.5% every year.

Domestic business leaders surveyed in this survey, which included 100 respondents from Korea, predicted that by 2020, an average growth rate of each sector is over 50% by digital transformation, and among them, the customer support sector would be most affected.

Moreover, 77% of Korean companies are in the process of digital transformation, but only 7% of them are classified as digital leaders. Organizations that are classified as digital leaders are building or preparing specific strategies for digital transformation, and digital products or services account for more than one third of total sales. In particular, it has been shown that digital leaders are benefiting from 20-30% profit improvement across various business areas.

In addition, digital leaders are enjoying more than twice the benefits of digital transformations compared to followers, and this trend is expected to become more apparent by 2020. According to the report, 48% of digital leaders now have a complete digital transformation strategy.

The positive effects of digital transformation on society are expected to be smart, safe and efficient urban development, improved quality of education using better textbooks, and greater opportunities for education and training.

On the other hand, in order to enjoy the benefits of digital transformation, organizations must build a data-centered culture and a strong digital ecosystem that spans employees, customers, and partners. Therefore, Microsoft Korea suggested strategies to be reborn as a digital leader, including 'create a digital culture', 'build a digital ecosystem', 'embrace micro-revolutions', 'investment in AI', and 'cultivation of technology for the future'.

▲ The conditions required to become a digital transformation leader have been introduced.

After the announcement of the report, the current status of Microsoft's data center in Korea was introduced. According to the current status, Microsoft is providing cloud services to more than 140 countries in 50 azure regions around the world. The domestic data center, which was launched in February 2017, is a cloud facility that has the highest level of reliability and performance, and it is playing a big role in strengthening business efficiency and continuity of domestic customers.

In addition, over the past year, Microsoft has grown more than 300% in sales in the domestic azure sector. Also, the sales of PaaS-oriented azure data services, including machine learning, AI, big data and cognitive service, not just a storage-based IaaS-centric, have grown 277%.

At the same time, as it is important to build a solid ecosystem of partners, Microsoft Korea introduced that it is closely working with partners in three ways – growing professional cloud solution partners (CSP), strategic partnership with major SI companies in Korea, and expanding open source support – so that the benefits of digital transformation would spread across the industry. Meanwhile, over the past year, open source-based apps, solutions and services running on Azure Cloud have grown by 700%.

“Over the past year, many companies are realizing digital transformations with cloud services through Korean data centers. In the future, Microsoft Korea will continue to play a leading role in helping the digital transformation by supporting the latest IT technologies such as AI, block chains, and Mixed Reality (MR) more quickly and easily in Korea.” – said CEO Soon-dong Koh.

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