“It is not easy for a small company in its fifth year to meet the heads of global American companies. But as a company with a core Fourth Industrial Revolution technology — an Internet of Things (IoT) cloud platform — we were able to accompany the President, which earned us the trust of American companies, and we achieved meaningful results in business meetings with some ten companies at the Korea-U.S. business partnering event.”

That is how Soonho Lee, CEO of Daliworks Co., Ltd., described the outcome of his visit to the United States late last month as a member company of President Moon Jae-in’s business delegation.

Visiting Washington, D.C. with the delegation, Lee signed an MOU for technology cooperation and global business expansion with FreeWave Technologies, a global IoT hardware company serving the U.S. oil refining and petrochemical sector, at the Global Business Partnering event organized by KOTRA.

The MOU was drawn up to connect FreeWave’s wide range of industrial IoT hardware to Thingplus (Thing+), the Daliworks IoT cloud platform, and on that basis to expand cloud-based smart factory business in global markets including North America.

The collaboration aims to track equipment status and operations in manufacturing processes in real time on the cloud, and to monitor the production environment in real time to optimize process operations and secure stability.
The companies also plan to offer a predictive analytics service that analyzes vibration, sound, and electrical-signal sensors to spot equipment problems in advance so they can be addressed.

After the signing, FreeWave CMO Scott Allen said, “The Daliworks Thingplus platform has a flexible system architecture that can be applied directly across many industrial IoT domains, which makes business expansion easy, and customer satisfaction with its system stability and scalability is very high.”

He also expressed the expectation that the collaboration will expand sales of FreeWave equipment integrated with the Thingplus platform.

Lee said, “The delegation was assembled on rather short notice, so there was little time to prepare — which makes me all the happier that we achieved the tangible result of signing an MOU with FreeWave.”

Beyond FreeWave, Daliworks also pursued MOUs with Dell EMC and with ARM, the global semiconductor design company; because legal review of the documents alone takes more than two weeks, the signing ceremonies could not be held during this trip.
“In Washington we also held some ten meetings, in cooperation with the U.S. General Services Administration, with American companies that carry out government procurement projects in defense and refinery,” Lee said. “We are preparing business proposals for these companies now that we are back home.”

Founded in 2013, Daliworks was among the youngest companies in the delegation. Yet it drew considerable attention for providing Internet of Things (IoT) cloud platform services — arguably the core technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“Because our main business is cutting-edge technology still unfamiliar to most people, we received a great deal of interest and offers of cooperation not only from American companies but also from the heads of the fifty or so other Korean companies who made the trip with us,” Lee said.

IoT Cloud Platform Services: The Heart of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Daliworks builds partnerships with companies across many fields that produce IoT hardware, and provides the software that runs on that hardware.

With a team whose core competencies and experience span cloud, embedded, and big data analytics technologies, its flagship service is Thingplus, a stable and highly scalable IoT cloud platform. Its customers include global corporations, and for mid-sized and small companies that find costly IoT rollouts out of reach it maintains a range of subscription services and license models, so customers can adopt IoT services easily, quickly, and at low cost.

A veteran of Korea’s leading IT companies, Lee has also seen the company’s technology recognized: Daliworks was selected for the ‘blockchain-based IoT trust control and management technology development’ project, part of the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning’s IoT convergence technology development program, and is carrying out the research.

Daliworks has also aimed at the global market from its earliest days. Through its partnership with Dell EMC, it integrates edge gateway devices with the Thingplus platform to deliver competitive services across industrial IoT; through its partnership with ARM, it links the ARM Mbed cloud with Thingplus so that the vast number of Mbed-based IoT devices can connect to Thingplus and deliver diverse IoT services quickly and easily.

Beyond these, dozens of global companies — Cisco, Qualcomm, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, SK Telecom, and more — are its customers or partners.

“Customer interest in the Thingplus platform combined with the ARM Mbed cloud is especially high in industrial IoT, where system security is critical,” Lee said. “Many buyers at this Global Business Partnering event took a keen interest in the wide range of Thingplus use cases, and many IT companies involved in government procurement — defense and other areas demanding high-grade security — hoped to become North American resellers or SI partners for the Thingplus platform.”

The fields where IoT cloud platform services can turn our dreams into reality are endless. Smart parking systems, smart hospitals, smart homes, smart farms, smart logistics, smart factories, and on to smart cities — the places that need a company like Daliworks are beyond counting.

Indeed, Daliworks has a solid record of deployments in Korea, including pilot services for the Busan Global Smart City demonstration complex project and an environmental monitoring service for Seoul National University Bundang Hospital.

Lee also visited Thailand last month to sign an MOU with CDG Group, Thailand’s largest IT services company, and on the 13th he took part in the ‘IT Road Show’ held by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning in Istanbul, Turkey, holding talks with local buyers.

“As a software company, partnerships with hardware makers are vital to us. From the very beginning we have aimed at the global market and worked to build partnerships with global companies,” Lee said. “I hope this U.S. visit serves as a bridgehead into global markets, the American market included.”

by The Korea Post, reporter Taemin Kim