INTERVIEW
DRIVING INNOVATION EMMANUELLE HOSE, GROUP VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER EMEA, RIMINI STREET, EXPLAINS HOW ENTERPRISES SAVE SIGNIFICANT COSTS AND FREE UP RESOURCES BY SWITCHING A THIRD-PARTY SOFTWARE SUPPORT PROVIDER.
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hat is your value proposition? Rimini Street is a software support provider. We created an industry that didn’t exist for 16 years by competing with vendors for maintenance. We found a flaw in their services because vendors are very focused on their products, not so much on their users. When you implement ERP, you must customise it - organisations spend a lot of time, energy, and money to customise this application to suit their business needs. That’s how they’re going to innovate and differentiate themselves. What usually happens when you acquire this software from a vendor is that you enter into two agreements. One is around the license, which allows you to use the software perpetually. The second is a maintenance agreement, which entitles you two to things. Number one, you are going to receive product updates from the vendor. And the second one, you’ll have the ability to lock a ticket on the vendor’s portal if you have any problems. What happened over the years is that the ERP has matured. And the vendors have started innovating less and
less in their products. For example, a few years ago, SAP and Oracle announced they were not going to invest in their installed on-prem products but to create a new type of product on the cloud. Users have started seeing that their maintenance costs have been increasing in terms of price every year, but the value has been diminishing. So we said, how about we provide a better service that’d enable these organisations to run any version of the software; we will support all that customisation and integration – basically support their environments the way they wish to run. Oracle and SAP are making about 94% profit margins on maintenance- It’s 50% of their revenue. So we decided to be very disruptive, and we can provide a much better service that is centered around the client for half the price. The software power houses are not organised for support. It’s not their core business, but it is ours. Are you competing with tech giants when it comes to support? The success of our support service has been tremendous because we provide the support that is pertinent to the client. We take time to go directly into their dev and QA environments. We don’t have any inhouse software, and we don’t provide big patches. So our clients are tremendously satisfied with our services – they rated us 4.9 out of five while vendors were at 2.1. That is how it started. But as you know, organisations evolve, so we created three pillars around optimise, evolve, and transform. First, we help our clients optimise their IT platforms, whether on-prem or the cloud. Recently, we have announced support for opensource environments as well. In addition, two years ago, we created the office of the CTO to look at the
IT roadmaps of our clients and how we can help them evolve to the next level. Now, we’ve got solutions around security, analytics and we do a lot of staff augmentation, which is very popular in this region because of the skills gap. How do you support these platforms replacing vendors? We’ve got 1000s of engineers around the globe, and we decided to have a very different model. In the vendor model, you’d have to contact their call centre, and often, you’d have someone junior answering the call; you’d have to battle through to get to someone who can actually help you. What used to happen typically was that clients would go to the vendor portal and try to diagnose their problems. So you pay a fortune for selfservice. We decided not to do that. All our engineers have 10 to 15 years minimum experience on the products we support 24/7 around the globe. If you have a problem, we will call you back within ten minutes. We have created an AI platform to ensure that when a client logs a ticket for us, they will be paired with the right engineers to fix the issue. We work in the client environment so that they have access to the software, source code, security layer, etc. So anyone with an ERP system is a potential customer for you? That’s right. We’ve had meetings with several clients here, and everybody told us, “Vendors have sold us so many things, and we are just starting to realise that we are not even using them. Can you help us use this product better? Can you help us use a product we haven’t implemented yet?” So we work together with our clients so they can maximise the investments they have made in these platforms.
MAY 2022
CXO INSIGHT ME
27
