CUSTOMER IMPACT STORIES WITH EDB
How Kyobo Book Centre Modernized Its Data Warehouse for Real-Time Analytics and AI
Discover how Kyobo re-engineered its analytics environment with EDB Postgres® AI to improve performance, optimize infrastructure costs, and secure data sovereignty.
Listen and learn:
- How a national bookstore manages tens of millions of product records alongside orders, payments, and customer data across rapidly growing digital and physical channels
- Why decades-old systems, rising vendor costs, and shrinking legacy talent pools forced Kyobo to rethink the sustainability of its data infrastructure
- What led Kyobo to modernize its analytics environment with EDB Postgres AI for WarehousePG after evaluating the long-term economics of operating large-scale retail data in the cloud
- How the new platform is enabling reinvestment into customer services while establishing a sovereign data foundation with greater cost control, infrastructure ownership, and readiness for AI-driven innovation
Kyobo Book Centre has spent more than four decades connecting readers to knowledge, culture, and ideas. But behind that experience sits a data environment as expansive as its catalog, spanning tens of millions of products, transactions, and customer interactions across physical and digital channels. As demand for real-time insight grew and digital services expanded, the scale of that data began to test the limits of the infrastructure supporting it.
Jung Heung-sik, Head of IT Support, shares how his team led a next-generation warehouse transformation to rein in rising data costs and establish a sovereign data foundation. Anchored by an on-premises deployment of EDB Postgres AI (EDB PG AI) for WarehousePG (WHPG) and integrated within Kyobo’s broader hybrid environment, the new platform is designed to support stable retail operations today while enabling future AI and vector-driven services.
“This next-generation data warehouse construction is meaningful not just as a simple solution replacement, but because it lays the foundation for Kyobo Book Centre to proactively design and operate its data environment. Moving forward, we plan to actively utilize EDB’s Vector DB capabilities to accelerate customer experience innovations, such as AI-based personalized services.”
— Jung Heung-sik, Head of IT Support, Kyobo Book Centre
Modernizing Infrastructure for a New Retail Data Reality
Kyobo Book Centre’s data environment had reached an inflection point.
Years of digital growth, analytics expansion, and rising customer expectations were converging on infrastructure originally designed for a different era. Core systems supporting web services, applications, and databases had been in place for nearly twenty years, creating growing maintenance complexity and operational risk. At the same time, vendor cost pressures were intensifying, and experienced talent for legacy platforms was becoming harder to source. Recognizing that sustaining service performance required structural change, Kyobo initiated a next-generation transformation to modernize the foundation of its data operations.
Building a Sovereign, Scalable Warehouse Foundation
At the center of the transformation was a re-architected analytics environment built on EDB Postgres® AI (EDB PG AI) for WarehousePG (WHPG). Kyobo established an on-premises data warehouse foundation integrated within its broader hybrid model, enabling horizontal scalability, operational flexibility, and more predictable cost management aligned to its retail data footprint.
“I believe that the ‘latest’ technology isn’t always the ‘best.’ We need to choose the solution that best fits us in terms of the scalability required by the service and from a cost perspective,” explains Jung.
By aligning infrastructure design to business realities rather than trend cycles, Kyobo strengthened its sovereign data foundation while creating a platform capable of scaling analytics sustainably.
Transforming Operations and Customer Experience
Executing the migration required deep coordination across data, applications, and workloads, from SQL conversion to performance validation across fundamentally different database architectures. Jung’s team worked closely with EDB and regional partners to navigate the transition, addressing technical challenges as they surfaced and ensuring operational continuity throughout the project.
“The EDB team—including EDB Korea and their partners—brought deep technical expertise to the project. When migration challenges arose, we worked through them together, validating systems and stress testing until we reached a successful launch,” Jung says.
Over a six-year horizon, Kyobo projects saving more than 1 billion KRW ($697,342 USD) in total cost of ownership (TCO) while improving system stability. Those savings were reinvested into customer-facing improvements, strengthening search performance, payment systems, and platform resilience—even during major demand surges.
Laying the Groundwork for AI Innovation
With its next-generation warehouse environment in place, Kyobo is now extending its platform strategy toward AI enablement. Internal analytics services built on the new environment are already in use, and the company is preparing to vectorize accumulated data assets to support more advanced search, personalization, and engagement capabilities.
Rather than treating AI as a separate initiative, Kyobo is approaching it as a natural extension of its modernized data platform. Supported by EDB’s ongoing partnership, the company is building the technical and operational foundation required to deliver AI-driven services on infrastructure designed for scale, governance, and long-term sustainability.
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