Zinus is a rapidly growing eCommerce mattress and furniture company headquartered in South Korea. Using its innovative compression packing technology, Zinus ships mattresses efficiently by putting them in small boxes. In terms of cumulative mattress sales, it’s the number one seller on Amazon.com. It has attained a 52 percent market share of the online mattress market in North America and has experienced sevenfold growth in recent years, going from sales of KRW 88.2 billion in 2011 to sales of KRW 621.8 billion in 2018. Based on its success in the North American market, Zinus is currently expanding to new regions including China, Japan, and Europe.
Zinus’ Korean subsidiary was operating an independent data center (IDC), but it required a global infrastructure that could provide stable services in light of gloablly expanding sales and production facilities, including expansion in the United States, China, South Korea, Indonesia, and other countries. It needed to deploy SAP quickly at its US subsidiary, and doing so required an environment where it was possible to provision resources from abroad immediately. In deploying SAP, Zinus considered key business needs, including: a global infrastructure to cover continuously growing businesses; ability to immediately provision resources from anywhere around the world; high-availability, with counter-response plans against downtime; convenient infrastructure management; and reduction in initial investment costs.
Department Manager Kihoon Kim of Zinus’ IT Team explained it was a challenge to select an IDC in the US and secure specialized personnel for deploying and running the server, noting that it created limitations in completing the deployment within an established period. He added that it was necessary to balance the need to deploy the server stably and quickly with the need to reduce costs.
Zinus’ US subsidiary initially used Microsoft Azure as its cloud provider. However, it found simple questions took a long time to be answered, and it was difficult to obtain the needed rapid support during downtime. As a result, it sought a different provider.
Zinus found that Amazon Web Services (AWS), with its global infrastructure, offered a personalized solution for a continuously-growing company that could not foresee in which country around the world it would next expand. Furthermore, given the attributes of the cloud, AWS was a logical choice to help reduce the initial deployment costs.
Zinus' migration to the AWS Cloud included technical support from Megazone, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner that has a branch office in the US. Kim explained, “The deployment of SAP in the cloud itself was an adventure, and we received the specialized consulting needed for our SAP deployment and operation from Megazone. When the AWS account manager made a personal visit to us and offered example case studies of successful SAP deployments, we gained trust in AWS.”
For integrated management of inventory and freight processes, Zinus deployed SAP S/4HANA ERP in the AWS Cloud. An ERP server and order management system were deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in the US West region, with duplicates between regions established by configuring back-up files on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) out of the US East region, ready to respond immediately in the event of any issue. Management was also simplified using Amazon AppStream 2.0, and security was strengthened to enable easy, external access to the SAP GUI. Finally, quick and stable communication was made possible by linking Zinus subsidiaries in each region around the world through Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) peering.
By moving to AWS, Zinus was able to reduce both the infrastructure deployment period and the initial investment cost, along with dedicated line costs; enhance quality of service with a global infrastructure; increase the level of user satisfaction by providing an intuitive GUI and convenient infrastructure management, maintenance, and repairs; and benefit from technical support handled by domestic-based specialized personnel for infrastructure deployment and operation, with quick, smooth communication.
Kim said, “We were able to flexibly expand our infrastructure even in the midst of our company experiencing rapid growth. We optimized costs by purchasing only the number of servers we required at the time, with the flexibility to purchase more at a later point, using the AWS Reserved Instances (RI) agreement.” He added, “We reduced costs by approximately 60 percent with the initial deployment cost and cost optimization.” Currently, a small team of IT personnel is operating Zinus’ global system, but, even if the business expands in the future, it has gained confidence by deploying and operating systems with the quick support of AWS and Megazone in South Korea. Manager Sinwoo Kim of Megazone explained, “SAP is a core system of all enterprises. Therefore, we provided support in an integrated manner that aligned with the local time in Korea and the local time in the US to ensure operation without any downtime.”
The diagram below is Zinus’ infrastructure architecture on AWS.
Given the nature of the cloud and its lack of regional restrictions, it was also possible to reduce costs by completing the SAP project more quickly than expected due to the helpful, accurate technical support received from specialized personnel around the clock and around the world. Zinus' Korean subsidiary also plans to deploy SAP on AWS in the future, since services in the US have been deployed and are running smoothly with the support of AWS and Megazone.
An AWS Partner Network (APN) premier consulting partner, Megazone provides IT infrastructure design, construction, and management services for enterprise customers. It provides integrated services of AWS infrastructure, security, management, and cloud migration and management operations to domestic and overseas SAP ERP customers.
For more information, see Megazone's listing in the AWS Partner Directory.