[AWS Summit Japan 2026] Taking K-Software to Japan!

Let’s Go to Japan!

Since opportunities to meet customers face-to-face in Japan’s IT market are limited, we decided to participate in as many relevant offline events as possible. The next question was: Which event would be the most effective?

AWS Summit Japan is one of Japan’s largest technology exhibitions. In 2025, the event attracted approximately 69,000 attendees, including representatives from enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses, independent software vendors, and startups. It continues to record one of the highest attendance figures among events of its kind.

AWS Summit Japan is one of the world’s largest AWS events.

STCLab decided to participate in AWS Summit Japan 2026 to increase brand awareness in the Japanese market, create more opportunities to engage directly with customers, and secure qualified leads with genuine business potential.

• Event: AWS Summit Japan 2026

• Dates: June 25–26, 2026

• Venue: Makuhari Messe, Chiba, Japan

An Exhibition Where Even Sponsors Compete for a Spot

AWS Summit Japan opened a total of 135 sponsor booth slots on a first-come, first-served basis:

• 9 Diamond sponsors

• 14 Platinum sponsors

• 20 Gold sponsors

• 32 Silver sponsors

• 60 Bronze sponsors

A total of 135 sponsoring companies participated in AWS Summit Japan 2026.

Sponsor applications opened online at 1:00 p.m. on January 14, approximately five months before the event.

Worried that a network issue might leave us behind Japanese companies, we opened an online clock for the first time in a while and clicked at lightning speed. Fortunately, we succeeded.

It was another proud reminder of the formidable online booking skills Koreans have developed through years of course registration and train ticket reservations.

How Could We Stand Out?

We initially applied for a Silver sponsorship but were not selected, so we joined the event as a Bronze sponsor instead.

With rows of standardized booths featuring similar monitors and back walls, we had to think carefully about how STCLab could stand out. We eventually settled on several ideas.

We Created an Interactive Sticker Board

We created a board where visitors could place stickers next to the operational challenge or job-specific pain point they experienced most frequently, including:

• Sudden traffic spikes

• Malicious access caused by bots and macros

• Slow infrastructure scaling

• Poor user experiences

This simple activity encouraged visitors to stop at our booth, relate to common operational challenges, and begin conversations with our team.

We Prepared Sleep Masks as Giveaways

We produced sleep masks printed with the word “OffLine” as our booth giveaway.

The idea was to communicate that STCLab’s solutions can reduce the time and effort required for service operations, allowing operators to finally get some rest.

We handed them out to the many visitors who participated in the sticker activity and showed interest in our products.

We Recruited a Kenshiro-Inspired Hamster

Because AWS Summit Japan follows strict booth specifications, we decided to differentiate ourselves through the video displayed at our booth.

To create something approachable yet memorable, we produced a solution introduction video featuring a hamster resembling Kenshiro, the main character from the popular Japanese manga and anime series Fist of the North Star.

Wave: AI Agent for Amazon EKS

Following NetFUNNEL, our virtual waiting room solution, and BotManager, our malicious bot and macro detection and mitigation solution, STCLab introduced Wave to the Japanese market for the first time.

Japanese companies have made considerable efforts to apply AI to real-world business operations. However, many have concluded that the return on investment remains limited because people still need to review scripts and make manual corrections.

Expectations are now growing that the development of AI agents will lead to measurable reductions in labor costs. For this reason, some in Japan are referring to 2026 as the first true year of the AI agent.

Wave is a Kubernetes operations automation and optimization solution.

Through predictive and schedule-based autoscaling, smart resource sizing, traffic management, and node management, Wave can help reduce operational costs by up to 70% while improving processing performance by approximately 10%.

Most importantly, we introduced the Wave AI Agent, which allows general-purpose AI agents such as ChatGPT and Claude to connect easily with data and workloads already deployed within an organization.

This capability directly addressed the needs of many Japanese customers interested in applying AI agents to Kubernetes management.

Wave aims to help organizations move beyond Kubernetes environments that depend on fragmented monitoring tools and manual operations.

Its ultimate goal is to provide a proactive and autonomous AI operations environment that can independently understand, predict, and control Kubernetes clusters.

Learn more about Wave:
https://wavek8s.com/ko

On-Site at AWS Summit Japan

After approximately five months of preparation, we finally arrived at AWS Summit Japan.

One of the most impressive aspects of the event was that it offered much more than booth exhibitions and hands-on experience sessions.

In addition to the main sessions organized by AWS, each sponsor hosted sessions demonstrating and explaining its technology. Even more surprisingly, large numbers of attendees lined up specifically to attend these technical sessions.

It made us wonder whether Korea also needs a stronger conference culture in which practitioners actively participate to gain information they genuinely need for their work.

The number of sponsoring companies was impressive, but so was the reputation of the participating brands.

Alongside global sponsors such as Datadog, Palo Alto Networks, and GitLab, major companies including NVIDIA, IBM, Splunk, Accenture, Red Hat, GMO, Salesforce, and Fastly participated in the event and contributed to a seminar program led by some of the world’s most influential technology companies.

Thank You for Visiting STCLab!

Surrounded by leading global IT companies, STCLab demonstrated the potential and competitiveness of Korean software.

We were able to hear directly from Japanese customers about the challenges they continue to face, including:

• Sudden traffic spikes and server outages

• Unfair access and unnecessary resource consumption caused by bots and macros

• The need to reduce cloud operations costs

We also built valuable relationships with approximately 100 visitors who expressed genuine interest in our solutions and requested additional materials or follow-up meetings.

It was a valuable opportunity to reconfirm STCLab’s potential in the Japanese market.

The exhibition may be over, but for us, this is only the beginning.

We will actively follow up with qualified leads to turn these opportunities into tangible business results. We will also continue enhancing our solutions to meet the needs of customers in Korea and around the world.

Thank you for your continued interest in and support for STCLab.

To learn more about Wave’s key features, implementation methods, use cases, and customer success stories, explore our website or contact us at any time.

Learn More About Wave →
https://wavek8s.com/ko