Rimini Street extends ERP life with mobility, analytics, security add-ons
- Summary:
- Third-party maintenance (TPM) provider Rimini Street launches mobility, analytics, security add-ons to extend useful life of aging enterprise applications
Rimini Street's pitch to customers has always been that they can can use substantial savings on vendor maintenance fees to free up their IT budget for new projects. Now it's providing something to spend that spare cash on, as the new extensions address the most common forms of modernization projects that customers invest in. According to Dean Alms, Group Vice President, Product Strategy at Rimini Street:
For many years we have been talking about how customers can save quite a bit of money on their support bill and use it for innovation. For some of these companies it's hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions ...
They are looking for ways that they can take a roadmap and innovate on that. We can show them where people are taking those innovation dollars and investing them.
Extending the life of enterprise applications
For many organizations with older versions of SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and other enterprise applications, the prospect of upgrading to a newer release is too disruptive or costly. But that's typically the original vendor's recommended route to migrate to modern functionality, such as support for mobile devices or analytics. The Rimini Street add-ons provide an alternative way of achieving targeted modernization that extends the useful life of the existing investment. Alms explains:
It really is a natural progression to what we're doing. We've saved you money for several years now, and many companies want us to extend those savings for another 5 years or even 10 years ...
When a customer first comes to us they're not making a one- or two-year decision. This is a big decision on their part. We can go in and say, 'You may not be ready to roll out mobility or analytics today, but when you are ready, we are there for you.'
They need to know that we are going to secure that platform, allow it to interoperate no matter how many technology advances occur, and allow them to innovate and go after other opportunities.
Rather than building its own software from the ground up, Rimini Street has chosen to 'white label' third-party SaaS offerings that have already been proven in the market. Its database security offering is operated by McAfee, while the mobility solution is provided by Capriza. The identity of the analytics provider is not being revealed, but it too "has been deployed to many end customers and proven out at scale," says Alms. In all cases, the white-label model means that Rimini Street will be the customer's contact point for supporting the solutions:
We'll be the first call, we'll provide the support, but customers have the assurance that this is a proven solution in the marketplace.
Evolving into a hybrid landscape
A proven ability to connect to the existing software with minimal disruption or testing is a key attribute of all of the extensibility solutions, says Alms.
The solutions we have chosen are very non-disruptive. We can roll them out without having to touch the core code, often in days.
The combination of SaaS-based extensions with an existing on-premise core system chimes with the hybrid landscape that most enterprises are now adopting, he adds.
This is a common theme with our enterprise customers. They are moving fast forward into this hybrid world. This is a natural evolution of the enterprise landscape. These solutions are adding cloud-based innovation extensions to on-premise solutions.
We have earned quite a bit of respect from our customers in how we support them today. If we can extend that to those other capabilities, that's a key part of our value proposition.
Mobility, analytics, security - and more
There may be future additions to the extensibility portfolio, Alms hints, although nothing is formally confirmed as yet:
Today it's mobility and analytics, tomorrow it may be IoT and AI. Those are just a few of the areas where customers are taking their support savings and putting them into innovation today.
Another area that's really important to clients is interoperability. What can we do to keep this software stable but moving along that technology path?
Available immediately on annual subscription contracts, the three solutions are:
- Rimini Street Mobility — provides a mobility framework designed to allow rapid creation and distribution of mobile applications that connect to existing processes, customizations and logic without any need for migrations or upgrades.
- Rimini Street Analytics — a self-service business intelligence platform that lets users pull data from multiple data sources including enterprise applications, databases or cloud solutions, to create their own custom reports and dashboards on the fly.
- Rimini Street Advanced Database Security — previously introduced in 2017, this is available for Oracle, SAP, IBM and Microsoft databases under support contracts with Rimini Street. Its "virtual patching" technology identifies and intercepts attempted exploits of database vulnerabilities before they reach their target, and can be deployed without requiring any changes to the database code.
My take
This is an astute move by Rimini Street, simultaneously extending the range of products and services its customers can buy at the same time as extending the average lifetime of its customer relationships. That has the potential to lift revenues on two fronts, while helping the vendor transition towards a future where its role can focus on the technology landscape surrounding core systems, rather than simply the systems themselves.
For enterprises wishing to delay costly upgrades to their core systems, these new offerings help them buy valuable time. They can satisfy the clamor of business users for modern mobile and analytics capabilities — or allay boardroom concerns about security vulnerabilities — without facing major technology disruption.
Ultimately, there will come a time when it makes sense to migrate to a more modern, cloud-based core system. But with these new solutions, Rimini Street helps ensure that the timing can be chosen by the organization, not dictated by the technology.