Dongbu Insurance Selects IBM to Build a Smarter System to Fuel Growth

SEOUL, South Korea, April 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it will provide technology and services to Dongbu Insurance, Korea's second largest non-life insurer, to support the company's enterprise-wide business transformation and lay the foundations for future growth.

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Under the seven-year Open Infrastructure Offering contract, valued at approximately US$60 million, Dongbu will work with IBM to streamline operations and build an integrated IT infrastructure based on IBM technology. Four IBM System z10 Enterprise Class and Business Class mainframe servers will serve as the backbone of the system, running on z/OS and Linux operating systems as well as IBM DB2 and WebSphere Application Server.

Dongbu realized that it needed to make a strategic investment in technology to support the future needs of the business and better serve its customers across the country. One of its key imperatives was to deliver a more customer-oriented strategy using technology to increase business insight and support decision making.

For years, Dongbu managed a complex operating environment where diverse business applications ran on disparate IT systems and operating standards. Due to this complexity, the insurance company had difficulty recognizing its customers across different business units and channels.

Under the corporate directive for enterprise-wide process innovation, Dongbu chose IBM technology after an 18-month evaluation of the offerings from IBM and other companies.

"Based on IBM's technology performance and price, we have selected IBM as the provider of Dongbu Insurance's IT platform," said Mr Kun-gyo Lee, Chief Information Officer, Dongbu Insurance. "Also, IBM has a proven record of providing clients with a long-term roadmap and technology with an optimal total cost of ownership."

As part of the project, new technology and workloads will be deployed. The new workloads and the existing core insurance applications will be consolidated into the new IT system, which will be able to run multiple, heterogeneous workloads simultaneously. As a result, all business activities can be conducted through an integrated user interface providing employees with a real-time, consolidated view of any policy holder's data. On a single server, the communication among applications will be smoother and faster, resulting in a higher quality of service.

Consolidating all the applications on IBM z10 will save both energy and space. Through its advanced virtualization and automation features, System z also allows Dongbu to achieve higher resource utilization, from a single point of control.

By converting its existing dual development language system based in COBOL and Java into a framework-based development language system, Dongbu will be able to develop offerings faster by improving the speed from product development, through insurance certificate review, to market launch.

"Our mid to long-term goal is to cement our leadership position in the indemnity insurance industry and establish ourselves as a global leader," added Mr Lee. "Working with IBM, we will build an advanced IT system that supports our customer-oriented sales strategies and differentiates us from our competitors."

"The financial services sector is under great pressure to transform, not only to increase the manageability of systems and the visibility of data, but also to increase customer value by leveraging new insights and improving interaction," said Suk-young Kang, Director, Financial Services Sector, IBM Korea. "Dongbu's new IT infrastructure will be Korea's first reference of a mainframe system running on both z/OS and Linux operating systems which represents a future model for enterprise architecture."

IBM System z10, with its proven 99.999% availability and flexible scalability, provides unrivalled high performance in terms of stability and security. Last year, System z10 was also adopted as the next-generation finance system by Kookmin Bank, BC Card, Hyundai Swiss Bank and other companies.  

The agreement was signed in January 2010.

About Dongbu Insurance

Established in 1962, Dongbu Insurance is the second largest non-life insurer in Korea in terms of net premiums. It currently has 3800 employees. The company's insurance products include fire insurance, marine insurance, automobile insurance and casualty insurance, as well as long-term insurance products such as drivers insurance, accident/health insurance, property insurance and savings/annuity insurance. For more details, visit www.dongbu.com

About IBM

For more information about IBM insurance industry expertise, visit: www.ibm.com/insurance

For more information about System z, visit www.ibm.com/mainframe

For more information about IBM, visit www.ibm.com and www.ibm.com/kr

SOURCE IBM