A US District Judge will preside over a trial starting today in Las Vegas related to a $209 million copyright lawsuit Oracle has filed against Rimini Street.
Having been an expert witness in a few software cases, I know both sides will have copious amounts of filings and expert reports. The questioning and the testimony will be outright boring at times, bombastic at others and the attorneys will mine a sentence or two out of that Big Data of millions of spoken and written words.
I find myself with my mind made up. Not pro-Oracle, or pro-Rimini (though both are blog sponsors), but as always pro-customer. I am a big believer in choice. For over a decade, I have written in my blogs and books about third party maintenance and compared it to independent auto dealers, and that the tech industry has a long history of third party options like plug-compatible mainframes.
What I like is the 3PM value proposition keeps evolving to the benefit of customers. What started off as a 50% off type offering, now has many other attractive features
From my new book, SAP Nation 2.0
“Many customers also find attractive the 30-minute guaranteed response for urgent issues, highly personalized service from what Rimini calls a Primary Support Engineer (PSE), support for customizations at no additional charge and the ability to run the existing SAP release with a promise of 15 years with no required upgrades.”
So, over the next few weeks we will hear bunches of boring and titillating software industry gossip, but in some shape of form, I hope the software vendors and providers like Rimini keep evolving software maintenance. It deserves to reflect the new world of ring fences and satellite apps that many vendors have acquired, and those customers have themselves implemented not just support for 20+ year old core software, it deserves better SLA and it deserves to be much cheaper especially for that 20+ year old core software.
