With Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, n11.com boosts agility

Established in partnership with Doğuş Group and SK Group, n11.com is one of Turkey's leading online shopping sites, offering a huge selection of products, from cars to electronics to housewares, and more. It was created using an open market concept that brings together more than 270,000 registered business partners and 23 million registered online shoppers. This enables customers to visit thousands of stores at the same time and easily compare products and prices, and then shop with a single click. The site offers a simpler shopping experience for customers, offering the exact products they need on a single platform at the best price.

Due to the platform’s rapidly increasing popularity, the company was quickly outgrowing its on-premises hardware systems and needed a highly scalable solution.

Also, because of the competition in the Turkish retail sector, n11 needed a hardware platform that would offer a smooth experience, both in general transaction speed, and in meeting demand during peak shopping periods, such as national holidays and Black Friday.

The company also wanted to decrease IT costs and reduce time spent on systems administration, so it considered a better infrastructure solution.

Due to the scale, scope, and 24/7 nature of its operations, n11 selected Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer for its ability to handle the wide variety of the company’s current and anticipated workloads. Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer’s advanced security, price-performance ratio, and OpEx costing model were additional reasons for the decision.

“We always use the latest technologies for managing our infrastructure, and a key decision factor for us was the scalability and flexibility of database resources which our business demands. We have to be agile and cost-effective in the e-commerce industry because the level of competition is extremely high. With Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, we can easily scale up resources for a specific period, which gives us the significant competitive advantage of being able to manage our campaigns without focusing on resource requirements,” says Cem Bakır, database group manager.

With Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, n11 can now easily scale to meet its anticipated high growth projections, as well as manage campaign-driven spikes using bursting to meet peak demand. Additionally, the company has achieved 50% faster transaction processing, so customers always have a fast and uninterrupted shopping experience—even during peak times.

By moving from a CapEx to an OpEx model with Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, n11 has also significantly reduced infrastructure costs. Instead of paying large sums for fixed on-premises hardware—much of which would sit idle for long periods—the company now pays only for the resources it needs at any given time, and can rapidly scale up or down as required.

This model has also added a revenue-generating dimension, as n11 can now carry out more aggressive marketing campaigns without worrying about hardware constraints caused by increased online shopping activity.

The company has also strengthened its database security at no extra cost by using Oracle’s built-in advanced security options, such as data redaction and masking. Customer and online shopping data is now more secure, while n11 also ensures full compliance with data protection and other government regulations.

The automation of Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer has considerably freed up database administrators, who can spend more time supporting revenue-driving activities and working on important innovation projects—such as the company’s recently launched used vehicle online sales platform, Garaj11.