SQL Server 2000 Consolidation: a business case

Case study 2: Korea Telecom
Korea Telecom (KT), once Korea’s national phone company, is now the country’s leading provider of
business and consumer network services. KT is a highly diversified communications company. Beyond
its core infrastructure and wireless communications services, KT is also a major provider of Internet
services, with over five million Internet subscribers.
The challenge
The transition from government carrier to fully privatized enterprise is as challenging as the change
from plain-old-telephone-services (POTS) company into network service provider. In the past decade,
KT has successfully managed both these transformations. But with the company’s new competitive
reality came the need to improve performance and reduce costs. KT’s IT infrastructure was, at the
same time, a significant impediment to delivering innovative services that help retain customers—and
a major opportunity to improve the efficiency of KT’s business processes and gain a competitive
advantage on costs. KT needed to migrate from a multi-platform, multi-OS, multi-application IT
environment that was unreliable, inflexible, and costly to one that streamlined operations, reduced
costs, mitigated risks, and maximized return.
At the same time, KT wanted to streamline service deployment and customer support. The key to
achieving these objectives was to standardize around an open architecture compatible with legacy IT
and network systems.
The solution
As a first step, KT deployed HP Integrity Superdome servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Datacenter Edition (64-bit) to consolidate disparate systems and databases.
In the past, KT’s systems had been dominated by UNIX servers and Oracle databases. Company-
wide, more than 600 UNIX servers of various kinds from IBM, Sun Microsystems, HP, and Compaq
were deployed, along with database servers from Informix as well as Oracle. KT was running 62
different systems for services and network management. As a first step, KT planned to consolidate
these down to 36 systems, including 13 HP Integrity Superdome servers. KT had been spending tens
of billions of Korean won each year (U.S.$20 million) on the expansion, management, and
maintenance of its system servers. Once the new consolidated system is deployed, the company
estimates that its annual spend will be just 35% of the amount it previously took to maintain KT’s
UNIX- and Oracle-based systems.
By reducing complexity, KT has reduced IT costs. The new infrastructure is achieving much-improved
benchmarks in performance, scalability, reliability, and price/performance. KT is expecting additional
benefits such as greater customer satisfaction, faster provision of information for decision-making,
prompt acceptance of new service, streamlining of the work environment through identical user
interfaces, faster return on investment, and reduced TCO. In addition, facility management integration
will facilitate the provision of recent management information to support business decision-making.
Further, service-level agreement (SLA)-based service management and workplace management will
contribute to enhancing the company’s quality of service. Last but not least, KT will also be able to
make profits by commercializing the company’s NeOSS (New & Next Operations Support System).
This customer needed to move from a UNIX/Oracle infrastructure to a standards-based, flexible IT
infrastructure, with lower costs and complexity, based on Microsoft .NET. The new standards-based
64-bit Integrity server (and 32-bit HP ProLiant server) infrastructure provides enhanced flexibility to
quickly introduce new services, pricing combinations, and more—and to deliver them to customers.
The standard infrastructure enables the consolidation of disparate systems and databases and allows
delivery of wireless Internet and multimedia streaming services—all using a common, standard
infrastructure. At the same time, interoperability with existing systems has streamlined the transition.
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