I drove by the Renaissance hotel in Powai on the outskirts of Mumbai in India last month. It brought back memories - I had taken a client there 15 years ago on a due diligence trip as they looked to outsource their SAP application management, Basis support etc. Over the next few years I took several other clients to other Indian and E. European cities.
Then in 2010, I stopped doing so. The economics were just not as compelling, the staff quality was deteriorating/turnover was rampant, the overhead of dealing with staff often many time zones away added to an already complex environment. The offshore, and even domestic AMS model did not die, but it has been ripe for automation and a less labor intensive, more shared service/multi-tenancy model.
I have been encouraging Rimini Street for years to enter the market. They already support customizations to SAP and Oracle in their customer base. They have an agile, small team model. They could combine Level 2 and 3 support for customers. They have a generally happy customer base around the world, even if the publishers don't exactly show them much love.
They have finally entered the AMS market. Here is the announcement.
Is it too late? The AMS market is going through massive changes. SAP customers have been ring-fencing ECC with cloud solutions, and two-ERP subsidiary models. Many ECC customers will move to S/4HANA in the next few years. SAP has a whole new slew of products I describe in SAP Nation 3.0 - C/4HANA, SCP, SAC, AIN, IBP, Leonardo ML and IoT and on and on. It's not your Dad's SAP customer base.
Yet the ECC-centric AMS market continue to chug along at over $ 80 b a year. It was one of the biggest components in the models I had built of the economy in the first volume of SAP Nation.
So, it is good for customers to have another, quite different, AMS provider. In many ways, it is also good for SAP. Better late than never if SAP customers can see operational efficiencies in the Run phase. It will make them more willing to look at newer SAP products knowing they don't have to continue to live with circa 80s and 90s support models around today's products.
