ITCEN Entec said on Tuesday it was selected as the preferred bidder for a 217.3 billion won project ordered by the Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS) to upgrade the operating environment of K-Edufine and build a disaster recovery system.

K-Edufine is one of South Korea's three main e-government financial systems used daily by 17 provincial education offices nationwide and 810,000 teachers and staff. The project will run for three years from 2026 to 2028. It is an integrated procurement project that combines an MSA-based cloud migration, construction of an integrated disaster recovery (DR) centre, adoption of a zero-trust security system and modernisation of application services.

The company said the project was recognised as an exception to restrictions on participation by large companies. That allowed major IT services firms such as Samsung SDS and LG CNS, which belong to groups subject to cross-shareholding restrictions, to compete for the contract.

ITCEN Entec plans to actively deploy AI automation tools such as Intellicen Code, based on sector know-how and specialised staff with extensive hands-on experience on the project. It plans to analyse complex legacy code and business logic to optimise them for a microservices architecture (MSA) and cloud environment. It also aims to systematise the entire process from code conversion to test verification to support a stable, error-free rollout.

The company said it will use the result to strengthen competitiveness in mega public-sector projects worth several hundred billion won, including the next-generation provincial administrative information system, which it called a large project in the public IT market, and the national tax AI transformation, which it described as core to national finance and tax administration.

ITCEN Entec CEO Jang-ho Shin (신장호) said the result clearly proved that the real standard determining the quality of public-sector informatization is on-the-ground experience and technical capability, not company size or brand. He said the company would complete K-Edufine by combining domain expertise and technical know-how with an AI development support system and win-win cooperation.