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.

What 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.

UNLOCKING VALUE

SOLARWINDS HAS RECENTLY LAUNCHED ITS SOLARWINDS HYBRID CLOUD OBSERVABILITY PLATFORM, OFFERING ORGANISATIONS THE ABILITY TO ACCELERATE THEIR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVES BY PROVIDING A COMPREHENSIVE AND UNIFIED VIEW OF TODAY’S DISTRIBUTED NETWORK ENVIRONMENTS. ROHINI KASTURI, CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER, SOLARWINDS, EXPLAINS WHY FULL-STACK OBSERVABILITY IS CRITICAL IN TODAY’S HYBRID IT REALITIES.

Why is full-stack observability critical?

There are many reasons why observability is essential today: 1. Enterprise IT infrastructure environments are growing in complexity. Most customers are moving from traditional data centres to hybrid clouds or multiclouds, depending on the deployment. 2.Applications are getting modernised with containers and serverless frameworks, with database modernisation happening in parallel. 3.The adoption of cloud services is accelerating, with hyperscalers such as

AWS, Azure, and Google providing many cloud-native services that are attractive to customers.

If you look at this increasing complexity of infrastructure, applications, data, and cloud services distributed across your on-prem and multi-cloud environments, managing it all in terms of visibility and control can be challenging for IT teams. This is where observability becomes important, as it allows you to monitor what is happening in your full IT stack and correlate the data with AI/ML to gain business insights and map service dependencies.

What is the difference between observability and monitoring?

In the world of observability, monitoring becomes a foundation. Your oversight becomes fragmented when you have point products for network and applications monitoring or database performance management. Observability provides holistic visualisation and correlated insights into what is happening in your dynamic IT environment. For example, if you are running a financial services business and your service health is 99.99 percent, you can drill down where you are missing the performance or customer experience and identify and resolve issues when you move to full-stack observability.

We have more than 300,00 customers, many of whom use our APM and database performance management tools. We want to evolve them into the future world of observability. With the launch of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, existing customers can upgrade to monitoring and observability on a single platform.

What are the key pillars of observability?

As the observability world has evolved from the APM space, many people tend to look at it more from application logs, traces, and metrics perspectives. However, we see observability growing beyond these fundamental pillars to building physical and logical network topologies and understanding critical components of service dependencies. This will help you understand the performance and behaviour of individual systems and shift from a reactive to proactive IT posture.

The first step towards observability is collecting data across infrastructure, network, application, database, and cloud services, leveraging AI and ML to correlate the data and develop insights into what is happening to a business service or systems performance. This cross-correlation of metrics, logs, traces, and topologies will help you predict trends, issues, and anomalies and identify what is really important to your business.

What are the key benefits of observability?

If you are a CIO or a DevOps leader in a highly complex environment, you wake up every day thinking about business challenges or how your IT organisation performs. Suppose someone can pinpoint to you exactly where your problems are and automatically resolve them or accurately predict service outages. In that case, you don’t have to worry about unplanned downtime affecting your customer experience and business reputation - this is what observability brings to the table for users. First, you start visualising, analysing, and predicting, and then you start automating and remediating issues to ensure service levels across complex and distributed infrastructures.

Do you have to monitor everything or only observe what matters?

It all depends on customer environments. For example, let’s say you have a financial services business. You have to observe applications, network, database, storage – everything because your service outage or performance degradation could be because your disk IO is low. Or your network latency is high, or your application has multiple tiers distributed across clouds. Therefore, when looking to solve availability and performance issues and give the best experience to your users, it is imperative to look at every aspect. So we are calling it a full-stack; it is a combination of infrastructure apps, databases, and cloud services, and you visualise across various dimensions.