Retailers are heavily dependent on the holiday season to meet their yearly targets, and Black Friday is the crown jewel of that period. In 2023, consumers spent a jaw-dropping $222.1B online between November 1 and December 31. Cyber Week alone, those critical five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, pulled in a staggering $38B in online sales.
The pressure on retailers and their systems during this time is monumental. Any disruptions on these days could mean millions in lost revenue, bad press, and legal troubles. So, when the Oracle Database of our client, a major toy manufacturer, went down just before the big day, panic set in.
The ultimate retailer’s nightmare right before Black Friday
Picture this: Black Friday is approaching, and you’re a toy manufacturer preparing for the onslaught of online shoppers. But then – disaster strikes. The database systems fail, and the potential for catastrophic financial loss looms. What did our client do? They called Rimini Street.
Robert Freeman, Enterprise Architect for Oracle at Rimini Street, part of the Rimini Support™ for Oracle team responding to the ticket, recalled the urgency of the situation, “A large manufacturer… had issues involving a failure of their databases…This was right before Black Friday… There were downstream impacts on their online retail systems… They were in a bit of a panic.”
The manufacturer’s financial system had gone down, threatening to derail their entire Black Friday sales. Receivables, payables, and all things finance were on the line.
The real culprit was deeper than the databases
Robert and team immediately jumped into action, working through what became a three-day restore process – a task that could have taken weeks to complete by a less experienced team. Freeman continued, “We immediately got our engineers on the phone with them and put together a plan of action… and basically held their hands throughout what ended up being an almost three-day restore process… At the end of the day, we got them up and running.”
It wasn’t just the database itself that caused the issue. Sudhir Kumar, Rimini Street’s GVP of Service Delivery for Oracle, a member of the response team sheds light on what really happened, “The problem was lying well below the database at the operating system level where the crash was causing the database to be not restorable… We were the ones who ended up resolving their problem.”
Rimini Street didn’t just stop at fixing the immediate issue. They dug deeper, ensuring that those databases would be active and stable through Christmas and beyond.
Happy ending: Toy manufacturing giant survives the holiday rush
“We put technical experts on the front lines who know the products and have probably been in that clients’ shoes as the owners of those systems at some point in their career and understand the gravity of what the client is facing,” said Kumar. Freeman agreed, “Having been involved in companies where uptime is critical, whether it’s healthcare, railroads, airlines, or three-letter government organizations, uptime is table stakes and getting a response from your support organization in a timely manner is key.” Compared to the vendor’s stated response time for P1 issues of one hour, Freeman, Kumar, and team guarantee a 10-minute response with an average response time of less than 2 minutes. That been-there-seen-that expertise and dedication to responsiveness was crucial to helping the manufacturer get systems online before one of the biggest sales days of the year.
Freeman summed up the outcome for the client, “An outage for them for an hour was representative of millions of dollars, literally, and they had a very successful season. They had no outages, and everything went very well.”
To hear more about how Rimini Street saved the day and prevented a Black Friday catastrophe, watch Robert and Kumar recount the details in the full interview below.