Daliworks: “Keeping Brazilian Ice Cream from Melting, from an Office in Seoul”
In the summer of 2013, Soonho Lee, who had only recently founded Daliworks, received a call from an acquaintance living in Brazil. A local cold storage operator had suffered tens of millions of won in damages when a warehouse breakdown melted his ice cream, and the request was whether Daliworks could solve the problem. Lee, who was then developing a cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) remote management tool, sensed that a golden opportunity had arrived. He completed the technology early last year, linked the Brazilian customer’s 10 cold-storage warehouses and 50 refrigerated trucks through IoT, connected them to the Amazon cloud, and now manages them from his office in Chungmuro, Seoul. Cold storage facilities in Brazil are managed by just one or two employees in a small office on the other side of the world. Within about a year of starting the business, hundreds of customers in Brazil alone had entrusted their warehouse management to the company.
Daliworks (CEO Soonho Lee) is a venture company founded in March 2013. Five people, each with their own area of expertise, joined forces, including CEO Lee, formerly of SK Telecom. A software (SW) specialist, the company provides middleware for IoT devices, cloud services, and an IoT management portal. Information from IoT devices is stored and analyzed in the cloud and then delivered through the management portal. Its greatest strengths are rapid deployment and cost savings. There is no need to build servers, and thanks to its middleware, the solution can be applied to any IoT device. Daliworks is the only company in Korea with an IoT management solution built on a global cloud, and there are only around ten such companies in the world.
CEO Soonho Lee said, “The biggest reason the IoT market, including machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, has failed to take off so far is that building systems takes too much time and money. With Daliworks’ Thingplus (Thing+) solution, you can save the tens of millions of won and the months of time it takes to build servers.”
The response came from overseas first. Business is expanding in Brazil, and enthusiastic interest is pouring in from Europe as well. The Smart City Expo in Spain, which the company attended with Thingplus in November last year, proved decisive. It has signed a contract with the Sirea Group, a French company specializing in industrial power and energy, and business is underway, with Sirea handling the hardware and Daliworks the software. The Sirea Group has distribution networks across Europe and North Africa, so the scope for future expansion could grow significantly. The city of Barcelona, Spain, has also shown strong interest, and a pilot project is in progress; depending on the results, the solution will be deployed across all of Barcelona. With pilot projects underway in several countries, the company expects its customer base to grow rapidly from the second quarter.
Daliworks is also preparing to target the domestic market on the strength of technology that won recognition abroad first. Pilot projects are underway covering factories, agricultural facilities, warehouses, and power generation facilities.
CEO Soonho Lee said, “For any technology to amount to more than empty talk, it must genuinely help real life. For IoT to truly spread, we must think hard about what practical help it can offer people.”
by ET News Reporter Yong-ju Kim | kyj@etnews.com
