Lotte Data Communication Vietnam enables successful business transformation with AWS

Has the pandemic changed the way LDCV does business in Vietnam and supports businesses in their transformation and operational efficiency with AWS?

Moon Geun Jae, director of Cloud Division at Lotte Data Communication Vietnam

In 2020, LDCV had its revenues reduced by 12 per cent. Nonetheless, we have resiliently adapted and brought our business back to normal during 2021. By implementing an onsite task force for 24/7 support during the lockdowns, we, together with our clients, have overcome such a challenging time while ensuring high service quality.

Furthermore, our service portfolio has been expanded to include more digital services to accommodate the increasing demand in the market.

Also, for AWS-related projects, for example for one of our clients in South Korea, we helped to decrease resource usage by half while increasing performance by 20 per cent leveraging native libraries on the AWS system. In another case for a global retail client, we supported to lower response time by 75 per cent through applying AWS's hosting service and advanced content delivery network.

Additionally, AWS used to be seen as an expensive platform for large businesses. However, LDCV has helped many small- and medium-sized businesses go to the cloud effortlessly and inexpensively. With the experience of AWS in optimising and monitoring, we have helped clients run businesses flexibly to scale in peak seasons with optimised costs.

We perceive an increasing need for digital transformation across all industries to cope with the pandemic, especially for banking and retail industries. Based on conversations with our clients, we have decided to change our strategic direction to emphasise digitalisation services, including cloud and software as a service (SaaS).

Within the increasing needs for digital transformation, we see the shift towards cloud usage the most clearly. During lockdowns, companies are unable to manage on-premise servers and networks while still needing to maintain their operations. On-cloud virtual office applications, as a result, are highly demanded to satisfy the remote work trend that is also expected to stay.

Additionally, the booming demand for online shopping during social distancing has forced e-commerce and delivery companies to migrate towards cloud platforms to ensure cost-effective operations.

Headquarters of LDC in Seoul

How has the partnership with AWS helped LDCV deal with the stiffening competition in the country?

To differentiate ourselves from competitors, we have built our strategy revolving around exceptional experiences across a customer's journey. This is based on two key pillars consisting of customer-centric orientation and a high-calibre workforce. With the customer-centric orientation, we started applying design-thinking methods to our operations and project execution.

Using this concept, at the beginning of each project, we first aim to empathise ourselves with clients’ situations and truly understand their needs. Then, together with them, we define feasible ideas via various interactive workshops. This new method goes hand-in-hand with the enhancement of workforce quality by offering formal training to help them obtain up-to-date knowledge and certificates. Internally, we also conduct informal training for knowledge sharing after the completion of each project.

Furthermore, given our 10 years of establishment in Vietnam, we have served a large portfolio of clients, especially South Korean ones, across sectors such as manufacturing, retail, and financial services. This allowed us to develop a rich understanding as well as experience to guarantee that our work will secure an effective digital transformation for clients.

There are numerous reasons for us to be a partner of AWS. First, given the market itself, the cloud market in Vietnam is developing rapidly with a forecasted compound annual growth rate of approximately 18 per cent, reaching about $500 million by 2025.

AWS is undeniably the market leader in this respective field for its stability and diverse ecosystem of solutions. As a result, being a partner of AWS is the right choice for us to ensure the success of our business. Secondly, AWS has developed an excellent partner support package that actively engages and supports us since day one. The package allows us to access both sales and technical supports to close deals with our clients and later provide best-in-class service quality.

Lastly, as a company originating from South Korea, we have also invested to develop our AWS cloud capabilities for quite some time and served a number of clients in the country, thus internally, we can leverage the existing expertise for our clients in the Vietnamese market.

AWS workshop with clients

What do you think about the current, large-scale digital transformation across all industries in Vietnam, and what should businesses prepare for a quick and effective transformation?

With a market composed of a young workforce and in need of solutions to mitigate the cost and risks of operations, it is inevitable that digital transformation is turning to be the norm very soon. However, many companies, per our observation, have not fully realised the benefits of digitalisation due to inconsistent implementation of technologies across different areas of operation.

Moreover, there is a lack of investment in streamlining work processes to apply digital and automation technologies, and a lack of training and support to help employees fully leverage new platforms.

Therefore, for effective digital transformation, a business should have a clear strategy and plan, with measurable objectives and milestones and customer-centric digitalisation.

Businesses should also ready themselves internally to ensure that employees have a basic understanding of digital transformation and how to leverage digital tools to boost productivity and optimise operations.

What is your vision for digital transformation and cloud adoption in the Vietnamese market in next 5-10 years?

From our perspective, we do have confidence that the size of the market should exceed the forecast of $500 million by 2025. Along with using the cloud as a storage location, local companies will be quick adopters of smart solutions available on cloud platforms to enhance operational effectiveness while improving the satisfaction of their customers on multiple channels.

This is the basis for SaaS to grow in the very near future. In delivering the transformation, the prerequisite is the focus on cybersecurity capabilities and ease-of-use of cloud platforms to persuade the transition from on-premise towards clouds.

As for South Korean business in Vietnam, we are actually seeing such a trend happening right now, which is resulting from the ongoing wave of cloud transitions in South Korea. Over the next 5-10 years, we expect this will be the stimulus for companies in Vietnam to adopt more cloud technologies.