Why Mercari Chose Electric to Power Their IT

Heading into 2019, Mercari, the premier consumer-driven online marketplace, had no dedicated resource for IT support and management. As a result, the burden of managing the company’s day-to-day IT needs fell to Mercari’s Corporate Office & Account Manager, Kirk Fong. On top of performing his functional work, he was having to personally manage the IT issues and requests of Mercari’s over 200 employees. Not only did this work take time away from the more strategic work he was hired for, but it required a level of technical expertise that Kirk was just not equipped with. As well, Mercari was experiencing a period of rapid growth and their current approach to IT just wasn’t scalable.

Kirk knew he needed an IT partner who could provide guidance around IT best-practices, take the day-to-day management of IT off of his plate, and that could scale easily with his rapidly growing business. Immediately, Electric was able to step in and give Kirk much-needed time back. From there, Electric established IT standardized processes, most important of which was for employee on/offboarding, saving their business 2+ hours per on/offboarding. As well, Electric moved its device & application inventory from a manual spreadsheet to its cloud-based, single-pane-of-glass visibility platform.

Fast forward to 2020. Mercari continued to grow and was able to establish a lean internal team that could focus on strategic projects, while Electric still carried the responsibility for day-to-day. In March of that year, as the global pandemic hit, Mercari, like every organization, was faced with having to make a split-second decision about transitioning to remote work. As the decision came down from Mercari’s executive team, Alex Rust, Mercari’s IT manager, was given 48 hours to roll out a new antivirus solution and VPN to their 250+ devices, setting employees up to work successfully & securely from home. Had Mercari not had an Electric managed MDM (mobile device management) instance, Alex would have had to perform this work manually on each device. However, Electric was able to roll this software out to all devices in a matter of hours, saving Alex 50+ hours of manual work. And, all of this was done remotely from within Mercari’s secure MDM portal.