Ajman Markets improves shopping experiences on Oracle Cloud

Ajman Markets Cooperative Society was founded in early 2008 and serves the 240,000 residents of Ajman City in the United Arab Emirates. The cooperative society has three locations throughout the city, with around 3,800 shareholders among Ajman’s citizens. The business offers groceries, imported produce and meats, cleaning and personal care items, and household and recreation supplies.

In 2019, Ajman Markets launched a new ecommerce platform—its first foray into online retail—and expanded into new product categories with sales of electronics and sophisticated home appliances.

To ensure service availability to its customers, the organization needed to resolve operational and technical issues that resulted in recurring downtime of up to 60 minutes per month. Whenever server downtime occurred, it impacted not only the brand’s ecommerce environment, but also its physical stores, with registers unable to function and employees having no access to inventory or the ability to scan shelf products.

Overall, Ajman Markets found that it was devoting significant time and investment to maintaining an infrastructure that wasn’t performing well. The company wanted an IT provider that could ensure responsive, immediate support, reduced downtime, disaster recovery, and lower operating and maintenance costs.

Ajman Markets previously ran JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on Microsoft Azure but faced frequent performance issues and server outages. The company began searching for a new provider and selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for its superior reliability and cost efficiency.

Ajman Markets performed a lift and shift of its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne enterprise resource planning application from Microsoft Azure to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. As a result, Ajman Markets improved overall performance by 25% and eliminated downtime. The move to OCI also reduced Ajman Markets’ operational and maintenance costs by 20% and shortened the timeline for adding disaster recovery thanks to OCI’s built-in storage resiliency, availability, and security.

Beyond addressing downtime issues, the integration also allowed Ajman Markets to benefit from a faster, smoother working ERP system. Moving JD Edwards EnterpriseOne to OCI enabled the application to work better and faster, leading to an overall smoother performance and a meaningful efficiency gain across all activity levels.

The company also gained the ability to access 24/7 Oracle Premier support with OCI service-level agreements for availability, manageability, and­ performance—guaranteeing that Ajman Markets could continue to offer high levels of customer service.

With JD Edwards running on Oracle Database, the company’s IT department and support employees have been able focus on core business priorities, such as improving the shopping experience for customers. Internal workflows and processes have also become more effective.

Ajman Markets had the full support of Kirti Technologies, an Oracle Certified Partner, for implementing its move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Thanks to the expertise of these industry veterans, the transition and integrations were completed smoothly, and Ajman Markets saw an immediate return on investment in Oracle technology.