Cisco is teaming up with South Korea's government to hasten digitization initiatives as the country aims to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The vendor, working under the framework of Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program, said it will invest in 5G, smart factories, cloud computing, and IT skills development. The initiative is also aligned with South Korea’s “Digital New Deal” strategy and the government’s I-Korea 4.0 policy that seeks to better prepare the economy and South Koreans for the tech-centric fourth industrial revolution. 

“I expect IT companies like Cisco to closely work with public institutions and universities, creating synergy in fostering people-centered digital infrastructure. The government will spare no effort to provide support for it,” South Korea’s Prime Minister Sye-Kyun Chung said during a virtual event with Cisco to announce the plan.

Cisco’s program in South Korea will focus on 5G for enterprises, cloud technologies with the Korean cloud vendor Naver Cloud, smart factory development with engineering services company Posco ICT, and education initiatives with institutions across the country. 

“Our CDA programs help power an inclusive future for all through innovative technology initiatives like our 5G and cloud infrastructure solutions,” Cisco EVP Fran Katsoudas said in a statement. “We are very pleased to introduce the program in South Korea and support the government and businesses in achieving their economic and digitization goals as we recover from the global pandemic together.”

Cisco said it is currently working with federal, state, and local governments in 40 countries to assist on digitization initiatives and collaborate on technology and services that advance those goals. 

The Asia-Pacific region is poised to fuel and realize the benefits of a fourth industrial revolution this decade, Sanjay Kaul, president of Cisco’s service provider business in the region, wrote in a separate blog post. 

Those advancements require network operators and enterprises to strengthen and assemble infrastructure that is intuitive, open, service agile, and automated, Kaul explained. “The existing network infrastructures are complex, opex guzzlers, and unable to leverage technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and segment routing,” he wrote.

Indeed, Cisco recently highlighted five areas of innovation it is targeting to help its customers lower IT costs and deploy more flexible and powerful network infrastructure: converged SDN transport, routed optical networking, a modernized stack for hyperscalers, edge computing, and 5G and related cloud services. 

The vendor is also increasingly sharing details about its vision for a flattened internet infrastructure under its “internet for the future” framework. Cisco’s vision includes a routed optical networking portfolio featuring Acacia pluggable optics, Cisco Silicon One, and network automation. 

“The internet and most large scale networks have been built on a three-layer architecture for the last several decades, and what we’ve seen is that’s continued to just drive complexity, cost, and significant inefficiencies in how traffic is transported from point A to point B,” Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM at Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, told SDxCentral last month.

“We’re trying to create a new architecture that simplifies the layers and enables a much more interoperable future that we’ve always had in IP that now we’re extending into the optical domain,” he said. “We’re also proposing an architecture that over time you actually move optical services on top of IP. Today, IP runs on top of optical services.”