More than seven months into its merger with the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corp (KCRC), the MTR Corp is on track to complete what it sees as the most complex information technology integration project in the global rail transport industry.
The MTR, the city's sole railway operator and a leading property developer, will cut the total number of enterprise server computers in the merged group by September and finish the roll-out of common software applications by the first quarter of next year.
From a high of 1,100 servers before the merger, the new company intends to keep a more cost-effective base of 400 servers. The larger MTR's data centres - all in Hong Kong - will be whittled down from five to three. About 31 common but minor enterprise applications will be deployed.
'Once all that work is done, we can spend our resources on new projects and pursue key innovations,' said Daniel Lai, the head of IT at the MTR. 'We treat IT as one of our vital support departments, just like finance or human resources.'
Mr Lai said the realignment of IT systems supported business processes that made it possible for the MTR to undertake initiatives including developing six new railway lines over the next decade and several large property projects that are either on the drawing board or under construction.
The MTR is a major player in a HK$39.5 billion plan to build an express rail link to the border, a project that will make Hong Kong the southern gateway to the nation's high-speed rail network. Services will begin in 2015.
To run safe and undisrupted railway services, the pre-merger MTR and KCRC relied on their respective IT infrastructure in managing assets such as tracks and carriages, handling back-end fare processing for smart card transactions, providing customer hotline services and managing lost property at stations.