South Korean Agency Turns to IBM Mainframe Cloud to Better Engage and Serve South Korean Citizens

ACRC consolidates several public services into one integrated call center

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May 16, 2014, 02:00 ET

SEOUL, South Korea, May 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it will build a new open-source cloud platform designed to help the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC) in South Korea to streamline operations and consolidate numerous national public service phone numbers into one integrated call center.

The new system will include a hybrid cloud and provide the backbone for ACRC electronic platforms such as "e-People" or its call service hub "The 110 Government Call Center." Through these platforms, ACRC is expected to field more than 1.25 million complaints, 2.2 million civil petitions and 30,000 administrative appeals per year.

The IBM mainframe solution will allow ACRC to handle its integrated database workloads on 20 virtual machines – as the system expands; this number is projected to increase to more than 100 virtual machines and to cover all ACRC departments by the end of 2015. The pilot project, moving six governmental departments into the new call center is already under way and is expected to be completed by the end of July. Once this pilot is complete, the remaining government departments will also be integrated into the system.

With the ability to support up to 6,000 Virtual Machines in a single system and dynamically share resources across workloads, the mainframe is uniquely positioned to meet the cloud infrastructure needs of ACRC, allowing the organization to become more flexible, scalable, efficient and secure, and to boost performance significantly while handling increasingly diverse workloads.

"By integrating public services previously operated independently, we will improve significantly the quality and efficiency of our service, while reducing costs," said HangNo Lee, Director, ACRC 110 Call Center. "The new IBM IT infrastructure will help us provision and combine call centers much faster than before and better respond to the demands of our society."

After considering proposals from different vendors ACRC chose the IBM zCloud solution. Under the agreement signed at the end of March, IBM and its Business Partner ITCen will integrate and consolidate multiple stand-alone systems, numerous applications and legacy systems into a single, integrated communications channel for the ACRC call center. As a result, ACRC will be able to expand the scope of its services and help provide timely interaction between citizens and local governments.

ACRC was launched in 2008, with the integration of three organizations: the Ombudsman of Korea, the Korea Independent Commission Against Corruption, and the Administrative Appeals Commission.

As the cloud market continues to evolve and service an ever-larger share and type of IT workloads, clients such as ACRC are increasingly turning to the mainframe to provide the basis for their cloud deployments.

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Svetlana Stavreva
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South Korea
HwaYoung Kim
IBM Media Relations, South Korea
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SOURCE IBM