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: In late November when we talked, you likened TomorrowNow and Rimini Street to "fiercely competitive cousins." How would you describe that relationship now?
Ravin: You can't take the facts away of the history because our histories have run together. There's no way to separate it. We look a lot alike in areas because I did both. It's like Las Vegas, when you go to the Bellagio and to the Wynn. Both of those are designed by Steve Wynn, whether he owns both of them today or not. You clearly see touches that are hallmarks of Steve Wynn.
The same is true in both services. I designed the TomorrowNow service. I evolved it and created a better service with Rimini Street. There's a lot of customers still at TomorrowNow that I brought on board.
You cannot take us 100 percent apart and say we have nothing to do with each other. Obviously, legally, we have nothing to do with each other or have contractual arrangements with each other. There's a very different feel between the organizations now: they're an organization that is essentially slowly dying and we're growing rapidly. Those are the differences that you see in the marketplace. They're trying to hold onto customers, and we're trying to figure out how to add more and do it as fast as we can.
CIO: What does its saga mean to you and Rimini Street? Are there any lessons there?
Ravin: The Monday morning quarterbacking will always be there: Was the decision to sell to SAP, in my opinion, was it the right decision? From day one there were a lot of questions: Could a software company be in both the discount market and the full service market? Could you live in both worlds of charging customers full rates for your own service and discounts for other customers using your competitor's products? Could you justify that and actually exist in both worlds?
There's still a lot of questions, and these are questions that existed at the time. It was considered a very bold move by SAP. But it was a very different time at SAP: It was a time of building a much more confrontational approach to Oracle.
Now you see SAP going back to their much more quiet position. They are not normally a bellicose company, and not a Larry Ellison model of street fighting. They are returning to their former model. But TomorrowNow sticks out now as one of the few points left over of the aggressive push of 2005, and it doesn't fit into the model anymore.
