As part of its 2015 reporting, Rimini Street shared with me they now have as customers more than 125 Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 100 companies. That is pretty impressive reach when you also factor their smaller customers and many other companies who are not their customers but use their benchmarks as leverage for negotiating down maintenance rates.
It’s not just the economics – many customers report they like Rimini supporting their customizations not just the standard vendor code; others report much more personalized service from Rimini. So, in many ways Rimini has had influence on the software and the application management outsourcing market way beyond what shows on its income statement.
I first wrote about Rimini in 2005. I have always liked customer choice and compared what they offered to independent auto service choices we have in addition to service from car dealers. In the last decade, my respect for the company has kept growing as they have persisted with so much hostility aimed at them.
The software vendors have not been nice to Rimini for the loss of maintenance revenue, when in fact they should be grateful Rimini has at least kept the customers in the fold. Those that move to the cloud are more likely lost forever.
Many people are surprised with the world moving to cloud solutions, that an on-premise maintenance provider continues to thrive. Actually for many customers, the ability to stay with a stable on-premise solution, albeit at lower costs is an attractive path.
As David Rowe, Rimini’s CMO explained to me in SAP Nation 2.0 (and similar considerations also apply to Oracle customers)
“CIOs are winning awards for driving innovation with savings from Independent Support. This strategic flexibility to evolve and grow their SAP application landscape is very important to these leading CIOs as they recognize that they aren’t ‘frozen’ under Independent Support nor do they need to be tethered to the vendor for ‘hit or miss’ innovation."
Many of my friends find other startups more sexy. That’s ok, but I doubt they can showcase many which have had this much impact on IT budgets.
