A Unique Ubiquitous Center in Korea

IBM established a Korean Software Solutions Lab in Seoul, Korea in 2007. In the lab, IBM operates a Ubiquitous Innovation Center. The Center packages custom-made offerings. At the Center, customers and partners are able to obtain information of technology trends such as cloud computing, business analytics, business process management, social networking, and radio frequency indentification solutions, etc. The center also has a mobile environment for testing and modeling purposes.

Supported by IBM's global resources in business planning and technology davancement, the Center is in a unique position to assist customers and busienss partners to pioneer new businesses in Korea and around the world. Below are two most recent cases that the Ubiquitous Innovation Center helped with.

Case one:

In June, 2009, IBM was selected to establish a city infrastructure project as part of the U-safety City project for the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ), and by the government in an effort to turn South Korea into a major economic hub in Northeast Asia.

The project was to make the IFEZ an interconnected, environment-friendly, digitalized and smart city. One of the purposes is to support The Global Fair & Festival Incheon 2009 and The Asian Games 2014.

IBM will build this public safety system using high resolution cameras to monitor activities in the IFEZ, helping the Authority prevent crime and even predict possible events by analyzing patterns and data in real-time via a high-speed wired and a wireless network. The system consists an analytics framework, meta-data structures, event searching, video storage, video analysis servers and monitor applications.

The U-safety programs also includes SOS emergency rescue, remote controllable safety lamps in vulnerable areas, as well as the intelligent public safety system and wireless city safety network, which is implemented by IBM.

The system is built using technology such as IBM System Storage, IBM DB2 UDB, IBM WebSphere Application Server and MQ. The system, running on a flight of IBM System x 3650 Servers, will be operated by SK Engineering & Construction Co. Ltd and S1 Corporation under the administration of the Incheon Metropolitan Government and the IFEZ Authority.

Case two:

In August, 2009, IBM in Korea announced that POSCO, one of the world’s largest steel makers, is using IBM sensor technology -- including WebSphere Sensor Events -- to make its production plant in Pohang Ironworks safer for employees and visitors.

With more than 500 employees, the plant has an annual production capacity of 1.5 million metric tons. The engagement is a great example of how technology is enabling smarter safer workplaces.

With the system, all workers in the plant and visitors are required to wear ultra wide band technology-based RFID tags so as to monitor their location in real time through the integrated system which has 90 sensors. In case of a fire or gas leak, people in the affected area can be immediately located and necessary action can be taken to protect their safety.

Posted by Mark Guan, IBM Media Relations. markguan@us.ibm.com