Leading B2B e-commerce company in Korea leverages significant savings from switching its ERP support provider to invest in strategic IT initiatives
LAS VEGAS, June 24, 2019 – Rimini Street, Inc. (Nasdaq: RMNI), a global provider of enterprise software products and services, the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products and a Salesforce partner, today announced that iMarketKorea, the country’s leading B2B e-commerce company, has switched from SAP to Rimini Street support for their SAP ECC system. By switching to Rimini Street, iMarketKorea was able to reduce its annual support fees by 50 percent and are now able to run their current stable ERP system for a minimum of 15 years from the time they moved to Rimini Street, without being forced to upgrade by SAP’s published 2025 end of mainstream maintenance window for ECC 6. Because of the premium level of ERP support the company now receives, iMarketKorea’s IT staff have been relieved of the day to day back office system maintenance, which is now entirely handled by Rimini Street, and are able to focus on and support more strategic projects within their company.
Eliminating Dependence on the Software Vendor to Drive Their Own IT Roadmap
iMarketKorea implemented its SAP system in 2012, and today supplies electronic products to thousands of corporate clients nationwide, handling tens of thousands of orders in real time. The company now operates an e-marketplace, an e-commerce site, and a warehouse management system.
iMarketKorea was happy with their stable ECC 6.0 platform and had no desire to upgrade to S/4HANA. In addition, the company did not want to continue to bear the high maintenance support costs in return for little value to their ECC software. iMarketKorea researched third-party enterprise support to decrease their dependence on SAP and reduce their expensive support costs, and selected Rimini Street as their third-party software support partner due to the Company’s established history and experience in providing its reliable, ultra-response support services to thousands of customers worldwide. Instead of relying on SAP’s product development roadmap which seems focused on moving their customers to S/4HANA and not on current ECC 6.0 development – a strategy designed to lock customers in to the vendor’s path – iMarketKorea now has complete control of their IT roadmap. By switching to Rimini Street, the company has eliminated any stress or risk associated with being forced to upgrade to S/4HANA by the vendors published 2025 end of mainstream maintenance date for ECC 6. The company has also been able to fully optimize their SAP platform under Rimini Street’s support, which in turn has enabled its IT teams to focus instead on establishing and operating their own business-driven IT roadmap tailored to address innovation priorities for the business.
“CIOs and IT leaders in Korea are tasked with supporting their organization’s growth strategies, improving efficiency and developing and implementing digital transformation strategies, while at the same time reducing their overall IT costs, and at iMarketKorea it is no different,” said Jo Young-wook, team manager at iMarketKorea. “Our decision to move to Rimini Street has not only allowed us to substantially reduce our annual maintenance costs – which ranked high in our overall IT spending – but we have also been provided a path forward for reinvesting these savings of time, money and resources into our digital transformation planning and implementation.”
As with all Rimini Street clients, iMarketKorea is assigned a senior-level Primary Support Engineer (PSE), who provides rapid response to issues and service tickets, and a quicker resolution on problems than they experienced with the vendor. Rimini Street PSE’s have an average of 15 years’ of experience in the software they support, and are backed by a team of technical engineers 24/7/365. Rimini Street also provides all clients with its industry-leading Service Level Agreement (SLA) that ensures a 15-minute response time for critical issues, and 30-minute response time for P2 issues. “In a market environment where competition is fierce, iMarketKorea has been able to accelerate its IT infrastructure migration to the cloud, allowing us to break away from the competition; at the same time, due to Rimini Street’s support services, we have also been able to better optimize our internal IT resources and completely transform our IT department,” continued Jo Young-wook. “CIOs face the challenge of reducing overall IT costs while simultaneously investing their budgets in innovative IT projects for the growth of the organization,” said Hyung-wook “Kevin” Kim, Korea country manager, Rimini Street. “iMarketKorea has been able to secure both the time and the finances they needed to pursue IT innovation projects. At the same time, as with all of our clients, iMarketKorea will be able to receive our ultra-responsive, award-winning support for their mission-critical system for at least 15 years from the date they moved to Rimini Street.”