BC Card chose IBM after an exhaustive review of competitive products from HP and Oracle. BC Card decided on the IBM System z mainframe for its low cost of computing, including energy savings and the system's strong disaster recovery capabilities.

BC Card is a new IBM mainframe customer and will transform and consolidate its distributed servers to System z10 servers. As Korea's largest credit card service provider, BC Card needed a computing platform flexible and scalable enough for global service expansion with high-quality payment services as well as the establishment of global standards for business process and IT systems to achieve its corporate vision as a global payment service provider. BC Card currently provides hosting services for local institutions.

Utilizing Korea's first payment system based on System z, BC Card also selected IBM as a consulting and system integration partner for its differentiated global capabilities in the field of information strategy planning (ISP), Next Generation Systems (NGS) implementation planning, integrated solutions and strong system integration experience in the financial sector.

"We chose System z for its continuous operation, service quality made available through IBM's mainframe software solutions, and economic returns for the years ahead," said Jeongkyu Lee, Chief Information Officer at BC Card. "We're aiming to become Korea's premier Global Payment Service Provider. We see System z as a critical success factor for our business objectives and service level requirements for customers."

"IBM won the highest scores in every benchmark test category from performance to security to flexibility," said Sukyoung Kang, Director of Financial Services Sector, IBM Korea. "Supporting 40 million cardholders daily equates to hundreds of millions of transactions with unpredictable levels of activity. Only System z can provide the necessary levels of performance, reliability, scalability, and maintenance efficiency. BC Card also worked with IBM to plan its IT vision and growth objectives."

Structured as a System z Solution Edition, the computing environment of BC Card also includes IBM middleware solutions, including DB2, CICS, WebSphere, Information Management, and Tivoli Software, backed up by IBM Technical support services.

As the most popular in the dynamic and critically important field of middleware for supporting enterprise applications, the IBM middleware stack was selected by BC Card due to the database integration solutions by DB2 and InfoSphere Replication Server (IRS) and, specifically, the utility batch performance of DB2 and the reliability of CICS and WebSphere.