[Small and medium-sized enterprises targeting the global market] Chung Hyeon-woo, CEO of Arad Networks, said, “New technology that places virtual overpasses on network highways around the world No. 1 in Korea is targeting global networks such as Thailand and the Middle East that are monopolized by the U.S. and China.”
“You can’t build physical network infrastructure around the world like Cisco or Huawei, but you can build ‘virtual viaducts’ on the roads they’ve built. This is the global competitiveness of Arad Networks.”
The world is ‘connected’ with the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. As enormous amounts of data are shared, the paradigm of network technology is also rapidly changing.
“Now, a next-generation network solution with both security and flexibility beyond simple high-speed transmission will determine the fate of the country and industry,” said Chung Hyeon-woo, CEO of Arad Networks. “We have secured sufficient technology and know-how through 12 years of national projects and 9 years of self-development.”
CEO Chung cited security and flexibility as key requirements for AI-era networks. He said, “AI has to send and receive a huge amount of data in real time, and what if this data is exposed or transmitted late. In the worst-case scenario, the entire city may stop. He believes that the recent series of hacking and ransomware damages are very minor compared to security accidents in an era where the world is connected through AI.
Network flexibility is also becoming increasingly important. A typical example is that when new equipment or services need to be added, existing systems should be able to be expanded without significantly changing them. “In the AI era, a flexible network that can be quickly assembled and used when necessary, such as Lego blocks, and disassembled if not necessary is essential,” CEO Chung said.
The company’s original technology is rooted in legendary American networking company Caspian Networks. Founded by Dr. Lawrence Roberts, who is called the father of the Internet, the company competed with Cisco and Juniper, the two major mountain ranges of the network market at the time, with an innovative technology called “Flow Router.” It also collaborated with the Korean government from 2004 to 2016, and the budget alone was more than 100 billion won.
Caspian Networks later changed its name to Sable Networks, which is now an affiliate of Arad. CEO Chung said, “The philosophy of Caspian Networks technology has evolved into the concept of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and has been passed on to Arad Networks. Global companies have also been recognized as a powerful source technology that can infringe,” he claimed. In fact, Caspian Networks has filed patent infringement lawsuits against 11 global IT conglomerates and reached an agreement on the terms of cancellation.
Arad’s core strategy is to avoid head-to-head competition with existing network infrastructure companies and to pioneer new areas. The company succeeded in implementing a “virtual overpass” on the network with a combination of “VRF+VPN” technology. It is a technology that creates thousands of virtual networks from a single device and realizes logical network separation for each IoT terminal or service unit. Its advantage is to provide a platform that integrates policy control, operational automation, and traffic visualization while blocking external intrusion or data leakage.
In the domestic market, it is producing results one after another. The company supplies smart home solutions to major construction companies in Korea, which has the largest share in the network separation between generations. It has successfully entered the public market with anti-hacking CCTV that has been certified as an “excellent procurement product” by the Public Procurement Service.
Starting this year, the company will speed up its overseas expansion as well. In November, a CCTV multi-network demonstration project applying ARAD’s network technology will begin in Nakhon Sitamarat, Thailand. The success in the city, which serves as a hub for startups in Thailand, is highly likely to spread to the legislation of national network separation. Based on this, Arad is planning to enter the Middle East smart city market as well as Southeast Asia as a whole.
CEO Chung is determined to actively target the global market with the identity of a “Korean company.” Networks created by powerful countries such as the U.S. and China are bound to cause concerns or political doubts about data backdoors, but we can be the safest alternative for third-world countries to choose with the technology of neutral countries, he said. “We will be the first Korean company to dig into the gap between the U.S. and China and set completely different standards.”
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