"Do you know what my first thought was when OpenAI's GPT came out? 'This is going to kill all cloud managed service providers (MSPs).'"
Lee Jeong-geun, CEO of Saltware (328380.KQ), a first-generation Korean venture entrepreneur, shared why he is betting on artificial intelligence in an interview with the Seoul Economic Daily at the company's headquarters in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province, on Thursday.
Lee is a pioneer of Korea's startup scene. He served as head of IT departments at Daewoo Motor and Daewoo Information Systems before co-founding Wiz Information Technology, a software solutions company, with fellow Daewoo Group engineers in 1995. He then launched Saltware in 2003 with the goal of developing homegrown system software products.
Lee's 30-year entrepreneurial journey has seen two major turning points. In its early days, Saltware focused on middleware-based enterprise portal solutions. Around 2010, as cloud technology spread globally, the company pivoted to MSP services. MSP revenue, first generated in 2014, now accounts for more than 90% of the company's annual revenue of 60 billion won ($44 million).
Despite more than a decade of solid positioning as an MSP firm, the global AI wave has brought a sense of urgency to Saltware. "Transformer-based AI like GPT is advancing to a level similar to human reasoning," Lee said. "If highly sophisticated AI agents automate cloud operations and management, the entire MSP business model could be shaken."
In response, Saltware has moved beyond MSP to secure AI capabilities. The company has launched nine AI services, including Sapi LLM — a fine-tuned version of Meta's large language model LLaMA — an AI chatbot called Sapi Bot, and Sapi Guardian, which prevents corporate data exposure when using external AI services. Saltware is also strengthening its data consulting and analytics capabilities through a data lake platform, positioning AI as a future growth pillar.
Saltware's AI business is beginning to bear fruit. Last year, the company completed a proof-of-concept for a customer service AI agent with one of Korea's three major telecom carriers. This year, it is in discussions with major semiconductor companies to adopt Sapi Guardian. The firm is also collaborating with global companies including Databricks, Red Hat, Oracle, and Cohesity to build enterprise AI platforms that integrate cloud, data, and AI.
"AI business revenue is now coming in as we combine our accumulated cloud and data expertise with AI technology," Lee said. "This year will be the inaugural year when AI business results become fully visible."
Despite approaching 70, Lee is already contemplating Saltware's path beyond AI. The area he has identified is quantum computing services. "If quantum computing commercialization begins in earnest within the next 10 years, a new service market combining AI and quantum technology will open up," he predicted. "We will proactively prepare consulting and service capabilities for enterprise quantum computing adoption to secure our next growth engine."