KT Corporation wanted to reduce costs and improve performance with an open source IT infrastructure. “We were experiencing performance issues with our legacy systems, and the maintenance costs of our existing commercial software were increasing at 20% annually,” said Eunjung Shin, deputy general manager of the IT Asset Planning Team for KT Corporation. “We decided to move away from proprietary software systems to open source architecture to reduce costs, eliminate vendor lock-in, and enhance the reliability of our service delivery.”

KT Corporation engaged kt ds, a subsidiary, to design and implement its new IT architecture. After evaluating a number of open source solutions, and completing a successful pilot, KT migrated its proprietary operating system and middleware to Red Hat solutions. During the transition, KT and kt ds worked closely with local Red Hat technical support staff. “It was pretty impressive to have Red Hat’s technical support team working alongside us to solve problems throughout the transition,” said Sang-gab Lee, assistant director of open source technology at kt ds. “Our well-trained team helped make our switch to open source and Red Hat software a lot easier.”

With its new open source IT environment, KT Corporation eliminated vendor lock-in and related ongoing maintenance costs. As a result, the company reduced its 5-year TCO by 89%. It also improved IT productivity and agility—particularly in application development and cloud operations. “Red Hat JBoss EAP is very lightweight and reliable. With the agility it offers, we achieved an incredibly fast boot time of less than 8 seconds and minimized app development time and downtime,” said Shin. “This allowed us to enhance the performance of our IT system and respond reliably in the cloud environment.”