Rimini Street Custom offers expanded third-party support
Rimini Custom pushes beyond Rimini Street's usual support of SAP, Oracle and Salesforce systems by customizing packages specific to a customer's enterprise applications.
Third-party enterprise support and managed services provider Rimini Street is now offering a new custom package to support previously unsupported enterprise applications. Packages are tailored to a customer's landscape.
Rimini Custom, available now, provides an assessment of a company's enterprise applications environment and aligns managed services and software support for that specific environment.
Headquartered in Las Vegas and founded in 2005, Rimini Street started by providing third-party software support for SAP and Oracle systems, later adding Salesforce and AWS. Three years ago, Rimini Street began providing managed services for these enterprise systems, which include technical services such as running and configuring systems, and professional services such as expanding systems into new geographies or unifying different instances.
Rimini Custom takes its portfolio further by including a range of enterprise applications that are not part of the company's supported products, according to David Rowe, chief product officer and executive vice president of global transformation at Rimini Street.
The idea behind Rimini Custom is to help customers lower the cost and complexity of running heterogenous IT environments, allowing them to focus on higher-value projects, Rowe said.
The process starts with Rimini Street consultants who work with customers to understand the scope of their IT environment, evaluate the feasibility of providing support for applications and then present a proposal for support and managed services, he said. While Rimini Street has a list of supported systems, the new service is for everything beyond those that a customer requests, he added.
"For example, they might bring us three products to manage -- Microsoft, ServiceNow and an old Lawson product that's now branded as Infor," Rowe said. "That will be a bespoke project where we may have some internal resources, but we may also go outside. However, we have the managers and the infrastructure to roll it all together and deliver it."
Rimini Street has more than 5,000 customers. Rimini Custom will roll out first to customers that have asked for the service, according to Rowe. Pricing will vary, depending on what customers need.
Managed services for changing environments
R "Ray" Wang, an analyst and CEO of Constellation Research, said Rimini Custom makes sense in a time when companies have to manage existing IT environments and invest in innovation as technology rapidly changes.
SaaS was supposed to be easy to own and cost effective to maintain and it's no longer the case. [Rimini Custom] is the right offering at the right time as customers look at reducing their SaaS spend.
R 'Ray' WangAnalyst and CEO, Constellation Research
"SaaS was supposed to be easy to own and cost effective to maintain, and it's no longer the case," Wang said. "[Rimini Custom] is the right offering at the right time as customers look at reducing their SaaS spend."
Services like this have been traditionally delivered by some managed service providers, but the effectiveness is often diluted by conflicts of interest with the providers' own software practices, he said.
"The services firms cannot compete as broadly and publicly as Rimini Steet," Wang said.
The idea that Rimini Street is offering third-party support and services beyond its base of SAP, Oracle and Salesforce systems is interesting, but it remains to be seen whether the company can expand into an entire new range of ERP and CRM applications, said Predrag Jakovljevic, industry analyst at Technology Evaluation Centers.
"They also do managed hosting for companies, not only third-party support, so expanding [makes sense] perhaps because they are exhausting their SAP, Oracle and Salesforce customers," Jakovljevic said. "But I'm not sure where they can get the expertise for [applications like] Infor, Epicor, Syspro, Sage and others."
Rimini Street has the support infrastructure, methodologies and systems to move into support for new applications, and around 1,000 internal engineers that have a variety of different skill sets outside of SAP, Oracle and Salesforce, Rowe said. Internal resources will be augmented by using contingent workers when needed.
"We have a proprietary process for finding, bringing in and certifying and training new resources," he said.
Jim O'Donnell is a senior news writer who covers ERP and other enterprise applications for TechTarget Editorial.
