By December of this year, a new laptop called “Onbook” designed for government employees will be rolled out in several government departments. (Image courtesy of Yonhap News)
SEOUL, Sept. 21 (Korea Bizwire) – By December of this year, a new laptop called “Onbook” designed for government employees will be rolled out in several government departments.
The Ministry of Strategy and Finance, Ministry of Unification, Forest Service, and the Daegu Office of Education are set to receive these laptops. The Ministry of Education, Ministry of National Defense, and Ministry of the Interior and Safety have already started using them.
Onbook is a special laptop designed for public servants and employees of public institutions. It allows them to work in offices, on business trips, and from home while following strict security rules. Until now, government workers couldn’t use regular laptops for work because of security concerns.
Even in their offices, they had to use two computers to ensure security: one with an internet connection for external use and another connected to the internal work network.
This project aims to replace all PCs used in the public sector, and it’s attracting attention because it involves ordering hundreds of thousands of laptops over five years, making it the largest laptop order ever.
Each government department is trying to decide which laptop model to choose, creating a competitive “Korean civil servant laptop replacement market battle.”
Recently, LG Electronics was chosen as the supplier for the Ministry of Strategy and Finance’s Onbook deployment pilot project and the Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education’s Onbook platform deployment project.
The Ministry of Strategy and Finance plans to introduce 100 Onbooks, while the Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education will spend 1.1 billion won this year to distribute Onbooks to 150 municipal education office employees and set up a platform. By 2027, the aim is to replace all work PCs with Onbooks.
The Onbook project aims to replace all work PCs in the public sector with Onbook laptops equipped with a cloud-based operating system (OS).
Initially, it was a competition between LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics, but in the first half of this year, foreign companies like Dell Technologies, Aisu, and Sambo Computer entered the market, making it a domestic vs. foreign competition.
Acer and Dell Technologies even registered to buy Onbook laptops through partner companies. Sambo Computer reportedly registered eight different Onbook products.
LG Electronics has a head start in the competition by winning the contract for the first laptop replacement program for government employees, making it the first domestic company to compete with foreign ones.
The Onbook venture is expected to be one of the largest projects in the public sector, with over 600,000 new laptops expected to be introduced over the next five years.
Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)
