When you work across multiple geographies like SAS, it is important to balance global and local perspectives. Products have to be available across markets, and designed to have global appeal. However, marketing and how we build relationships with customers have to fit the local context. One advantage of working with partners is the ability to tap into local knowledge.
The advantage of having a ‘local office’
SAS partner Kolon Benit, in South Korea, is probably best broadly described as an IT company. It distributes IT services and solutions to companies across Korea. The company’s LinkedIn page suggests that Kolon Benit could be “your Korea office”—and while SAS has a presence in Korea, it is certainly helpful to get information from local partners about market trends in the area. SangSub Chong is head of the digital experience (DX) business division at Kolon Benit. He sees some clear and accelerating market trends in the region.
“The market trend in analytics is clear. It is evolving from traditional statistical analysis to greater use of machine learning, deep learning, and Model Ops, and how they can be applied to operations. The advent of ChatGTP has changed things again, with customer focus moving from traditional to generative AI.”
In other geographies, we—and many other software companies—are finding that companies know that generative AI is likely to be a major factor in remaining competitive in future, and are investing heavily, but this is still early days. SangSub Chong notes that this is also true in Korea.
“Generative AI is a hot topic, but there is a significant gap with customer expectations. C-level customers are confident that generative AI will have an impact on the future of their company, but we need to think about how it can provide business value to our customers. Above all, we need to address security issues. The key is to solve technical problems.”
The situation may vary by sector, and particularly with the level of regulation or requirements for security.
“Financial institutions are limited in their use of public cloud. Both public cloud and AI are very much in the early introduction stage in that sector, because of the security issues. There are limitations to overcome, but for vendors who have solutions, I think this will be an opportunity. There are also opportunities in manufacturing, especially drawing on early experience in the financial sector.”
Supporting implementation
One perennial question is how to manage implementation. We often see companies invest heavily in new technology or systems, but find it hard to get full value from that investment. Sometimes there are country-specific reasons why this may happen. This certainly seems to be the case in Korea.
“If we are talking about SAS systems and solution, I think part of the problem is a lack of experts. Universities here tend to teach Python, not SAS or other programming languages, so that can create problems later. However, this can be solved by better education both within companies and at universities.”
Mr. Chong adds that there is also a lack of both technical and change management expertise in some companies.
“We have seen a lack of proper technical support after building solutions. Additionally, a lot of these big projects are carried out in a top-down way, and companies don’t focus on change management for employees. It is important to remember the basics when building and operating a system. Lastly, the business needs to develop internal capacity to manage and upgrade the system.”
Building success
Mr. Chong suggests that the key to success in this market is a focus on value.
“We should not focus on the competition between open source and proprietary software. The key is to consider the value that the solution brings to the customer, whether the language is Python or SAS. Both have advantages, and we should bring them together.”
He notes that the ability to link SAS Viya to open source is a big advantage, because it opens up the platform to more users. However, he suggests that this capability is not well known, and proposes a solution.
“It’s been quite a while since Viya was released. Openness has been emphasized since its inception, but the market is still not fully aware of it. It would be good if there were more success stories related to this. I think this is somewhere that we could work together to build value for both of us, and our customers.”
