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.
What's next for Ravin? Senior Editor Thomas Wailgum talked to Ravin about whether Rimini Street should buy TomorrowNow and if he was planning to go after SAP and offer third-party support for its products.
CIO: Have you had any negotiations with SAP about purchasing TomorrowNow?
Seth Ravin: I can't actually comment on that, but I can just tell you that, currently, we have no discussions ongoing. We looked at it starting in November, and we told you that we were going to take a good hard look. We looked at metrics from the outside, the numbers that are available through SAP's own financial disclosures, and other information available, just compiling the data.
We continued to expand our staff and to add a lot of different clients organically from Oracle. Adding into our growth is the migration of TomorrowNow customers as well, which is a secondary business for us that's been extremely brisk. What we see are not only the customers that are making the conversion—not only for stability reasons but because we're offering more value for the money and we're proving a step up in service from TomorrowNow. So they're getting more in the process too, so it's not just a straight across move for them.
Of course, all this eventually led us to reach the conclusion that there was no reason to pay for something that's going to come to us for free. Paying might speed that transaction, but the reality is that we think we can put that money to better use, servicing those clients, and in our own growth, rather than paying SAP for it. It's going to take a little longer to do it on a one-by-one basis versus a single transaction, but I think it's the right thing to do.
CIO: You said TomorrowNow customers will get a "step up in service" as compared to what they were getting before. What types of services are those?
Ravin: Our basic model for TomorrowNow customers is that you're going to get the same kind of savings. The important part is that most TomorrowNow customers have been pretty happy with the service, but it's more that they want a company that's really focused on the long term.
What we're offering is on top of what they're used to, which is the vanilla offering that I actually assembled—because it hasn't changed much from what I put together at TomorrowNow several years ago when we were launching the company. So what we provide is extended coverage beyond that, as part of what I built at Rimini Street.
