Piolink president, Moon Hong-joo, said the January 25 Internet crisis triggered interest in L7 switches with load balancing, traffic management and data filtering functions; the market has since expanded. The market began recognizing technology of Piolink's products, helping its market share jump to 15 percent, the president added.
The company forecast that as the U.S. economy turned to recovery from the outset of this year, the domestic IT market will follow suit from the second half. Accordingly, the sluggish investments in the domestic IT industry will improve gradually and more money will be channeled into building effective network infrastructure. Especially, on evaluations that investments in gigabit-class infrastructures in the enterprise products market will further rise, Piolink will pursue positive marketing and sales tactics for its flagship L4-L7 switches -- the 'Pinkbox 3000' and 'Pinkbox 4000' series. To catch up with the great interest of IT administrators for network security and for ways to build cut-off systems in network infrastructure, the company provided from the end of last year an L7 virus packet filtering function to cut off worm viruses and denial of service attacks and hacking.
Piolink expects the VoIP business will enjoy a boom this year helped by the introduction of the Internet phone identification code and resulting expansion of the convergence market based on IP telephony. The company has set sales goal at 17 billion for this year and 35 billion for next year, much higher thean the 6 billion achiered last year. Piolink established Pioneer Lab recently in efforts to upgrade its technological power. Together with its existing research center, Pioneer Lab will devote itself to the development of market-leading technologies, company sources said. Piolink boasts that it has as much as 80 percent of the domestic VPN (virtual private network) loadbalancing system market and supplied the products to 300 private and public companies at home and abroad.
The company successfully entered Japan. by supplying its devices to Hitachi and Mitsubishi last year and also made inroads into China and other Asian markets. Altogether, the number of its foreign customers increased to 500. Furthermore, Piolink signed a sales agency contract with Ampere and Nikkei of Japan this year, and plans to sign contracts with three more Japanese companies in the second half, consolidating its market base in Japan.