The Man Behind 'Half Off' Third-Party Software Maintenance
Rimini Street's Seth Ravin has quietly amassed nearly 200 customers who don't want to pay Oracle's annual maintenance fees. In an interview, Ravin discusses why that's so, the turbulence in the market and whether SAP is next on his product offering list.
CIO — Seth Ravin, president and CEO of third-party software maintenance provider Rimini Street, is a self-described entrepreneur. He's been that way his whole life. In the third grade, for instance, he was peddling packs of Bubble Yum bubblegum because it was a "rare commodity" at his school, he says.
At 13, Ravin cofounded Real Computing, a computer consultancy that developed a word-processing alternative for the Tandy TRS-80, the illustrious microcomputer that Radio Shack sold in the late 1970s. "There was only one word processor out there, and it was expensive, like $200," he recalls. Real Computing's product sold for $50, taking dead aim at Radio Shack's product. "I went head to head with Radio Shack at several conventions," Ravin says.
Today, at 41, Ravin is still pushing a cut-rate business model and taking on the computer industry's establishment. But his target now isn't word-processing software; it's enterprise software maintenance.
He founded Rimini Street in 2005, and the pitch was simple: third-party maintenance and support services on enterprise software for half the cost of what a company would typically pay Oracle (which owns the Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications Rimini Street services).
Rimini Street is Ravin's second act in the third-party maintenance business. In 2002, Ravin and fellow PeopleSoft veteran Andrew Nelson cofounded TomorrowNow, which has the exact same business model as Rimini Street. In January 2005, however, Ravin and Nelson sold the company to SAP. Nelson stuck around SAP; Ravin lasted just three months there.
Since then, TomorrowNow's (and SAP's) world has been rocked. An embarrassing lawsuit filed by Oracle in March 2007 alleged that TomorrowNow employees had "engaged in systematic, illegal access to—and taking from—Oracle's computerized customer support systems." (The suit is still pending.) Nelson resigned from TomorrowNow in November 2007, and SAP seems like it can't get rid of TomorrowNow fast enough, putting a "For Sale" sign on TomorrowNow's front lawn and finding no buyers thus far. (See "SAP's Purchase and Attempt to Sell Off TomorrowNow" for an in-depth account of the TomorrowNow saga.)
According to SAP's 2007 annual report, the TomorrowNow subsidiary had an operating loss of approximately $35 million in 2007.
Which leaves Rimini Street in the driver's seat. Ravin reports that Rimini Street has a steady stream of former TomorrowNow customers coming to his company. First quarter 2008 revenue, bookings and invoicing at Rimini Street have all increased more than 100 percent compared to the same quarter last year and more than 39 percent when compared to the fourth quarter of 2007. It now provides support services to more than 175 Fortune 500, midmarket and public-sector organizations using Oracle's Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications.
