S Korea’s Kakao clicks on Rimini Street for database support

Image courtesy of Kakao

South Korean internet and mobile messaging firm Kakao has switched to Rimini Street support for its Oracle Database and now receives premium, ultra-responsive support for its mission-critical Oracle Database instances for at least 15 years from the time the company transitioned to Rimini Street support with no required upgrades.

Kakao also immediately realised savings of 50% in annual support fees, and enabled to divert resource savings to more strategic initiatives across the company.

Kakao runs a brand and service portfolio that includes mobile messaging with Kakao Talk, gaming, music, e-mail, search, and news, providing these services to tens of thousands of people every day. 

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While they were happy with their robust database system, Kakao wanted to reduce the overall spend for their database support, for which they were seeing little ROI. This led Kakao to explore third-party support as an option to help them reduce the high fees they were paying the vendor annually for maintenance plus eliminate the forced upgrades just to maintain full support. After considerable due diligence, the company selected Rimini Street.

“Our strategy is to eventually move Kakao’s existing Oracle Database to an open source database such as MySQL, Maria, or PostgreSQL,” said Tonny Yi, head of Kakao’s data platform team.

“Since switching to Rimini Street, we have reduced our database maintenance costs significantly, and my team is now free to focus on other initiatives to improve our business, like this database migration,” said Yi. “Furthermore, we receive responsive service and expert support from our assigned Primary Support engineer and the team of Rimini Street specialists.”

As with all Rimini Street clients, Kakao is assigned a seasoned Primary Support Engineer (PSE) who is backed by a team of technical experts with an average of 15 years’ experience in the client’s software environment.

“By switching to Rimini Street, the Kakao data platform team receives ultra-responsive support for its databases, is no longer reliant on a forced upgrade to retain full support and can execute on its open source transition strategy,” said Hyung-wook Kim, regional general manager for Korea at Rimini Street.