Those things are support for customizations, which has never been offered by Oracle and has never been apart of TomorrowNow's package. And what that means is that most customers have 20 percent or more of customization in their software code, and they're left to fend for themselves on any of those issues because the vendor won't touch it, and TomorrowNow's model generally excludes it. Our model includes it and provides coverage for it at the same level of the rest of the software that's provided from the vendors.

That's a huge, huge improvement. You can probably find some Gartner or Forrester analysts who will tell you that's one of the top features that nobody else has ever offered because it requires a certain amount of risk because you are writing an insurance policy on code that has not been delivered from the vendor and that [Rimini Street] didn't write ourselves.

Other parts of that are interoperability coverage over time, as [customers] need to interface with other systems as they come along. And then data performance: as you gather more data in to your system, performance becomes an issue. Neither of those interoperability or performance [services] are considered a standard part of maintenance when it comes to Oracle or TomorrowNow. These items are considered special consulting engagements [charged] by the hour.

So we're redefining the boundaries of support and digging into what used to be consulting by the hour. We're now giving a whole new scope of services that customers used to have to pay for on top of maintenance. We're rolling it all into that 50 percent off of what Oracle charges.

CIO: After SAP announced that TomorrowNow was up for sale in November 2007, we were left to speculate about what TomorrowNow customers were thinking at the time. Can you tell me what customers who have migrated to Rimini Street from TomorrowNow were feeling then and in the interim?

Ravin: Across the board, I have not found a customer of TomorrowNow [who hasn't felt upset because] you don't tell customers who depend on you for mission-critical support, who assume that you're going to provide that support for years to come, via a press announcement that you're putting the company up for sale without talking to the customers.

That's not they way people expect SAP to conduct its business. When you're in charge of systems that are processing up to billions of dollars in transactions that you can't run without their support, the idea of waiting around to see what they're publishing next and what's going to come out in the media is just not a tenable solution for major organizations. Without any communication from SAP, they have no choice but to take action on their own to protect themselves. It was definitely a huge misstep on SAP's part.