NHN, Intel team up to take on cloud business

South Korean IT heavyweight NHN Corp. and US-based tech giant Intel Corp. have entered into a strategic partnership to boost their presence in the cloud market via product collaborations, data center launches and overseas market expansion.

During a web conference on Nov. 26, NHN announced the launch of its Desktop as a Service (DaaS) powered by Intel Optane technology, a differentiated virtual desktop infrastructure that promises an optimized digital workplace.

“Together with Intel, we will meet the rising demand for digital transformation while securing global competitiveness,” said Kim Dong-hoon, director of NHN's cloud business department.

The move will facilitate NHN's entry into the global market backed by Intel's robust network. The main areas of collaboration will include managing autonomous data, establishing smart facilities and services, and cooperating on artificial intelligence-related projects.

The two companies will also work to promote Toast Cloud Center 2, NHN's next-generation data center that will use Intel technology. The data center will be powered by artificial intelligence and foster future industries such as smart homes, digital healthcare, smart manufacturing and smart cities. 

CLOUD BUSINESSES ON THE RISE

NHN and Intel's collaboration is no surprise as both global and domestic companies have been jostling to lead the cloud service market and looking to expand their Korean presence by constructing data centers.

The country's largest portal Naver Corp. and the No. 1 messaging app operator Kakao Corp. are both working to build data centers by 2022 and 2023, respectively.

AWS, the cloud service subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., recently increased the capacity of its data centers in Seoul as more Korean companies use its services.

Google, which offers the Google Cloud Platform, launched its data center in Seoul in February, while Microsoft, with its Microsoft Azure cloud computing service center already in Seoul, plans to set up its second data center in the southeastern city of Busan in the coming months.  

German enterprise software giant SAP has also unveiled plans to build a data center in Korea by the second quarter of next year.

Write to Joo-wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com
Danbee Lee edited this article.