We've added new investor groups and we intend to make [Rimini Street] much, much bigger rather than sell it off. That's probably the lesson learned from TomorrowNow, where people might think we sold too early.

CIO: Now that your "non-compete" agreement has expired with SAP, will you be offering third-party support for SAP products?

Ravin: I don't think we've made any secret of the fact that we've been eyeing the market.

We've had numerous, unsolicited calls from SAP customers looking for a Rimini Street solution for SAP's R/3 products that are coming up for retirement, who are having the exact same business issue. We've been on the phone talking to them in an exploratory mode, wanting to understand the customers and their business issues. We want to make sure that we could provide a product that would me their needs and would be valuable.

So far we've heard that the business issue matches exactly the same as we have with the Oracle customers. What they're running on was very expensive to put in place; what they're running on is working. A lot of them are manufacturers, and they don't like to tinker with systems they already have working.

They don't see the value proposition of moving forward to a new NetWeaver platform. The business case is not there to spend the kind of money that would be required for the upgrade. And the customers are starting to for alternatives.

This maintenance rate change [by SAP] was one more sign that SAP could no longer hold on to its old numbers. The push for margin, and that [SAP] couldn't ignore the fact that Oracle was getting 22 percent, and that they were leaving money on the table. It drove more SAP customers to call us. When this starts to hit—how [the maintenance fee increase] is implemented and how they apply it to customers—I think we'll create a firestorm of opportunity in the SAP world. There is building consensus on our side that an SAP offering should be looked at seriously.

CIO: Companies like Rimini Street give CIOs and businesses more options with maintenance and support to cut the prices in half. Software-as-a-service and on-demand applications are also providing a new and different software option for companies—

Ravin: But remember the one big difference in what we do. This is the single biggest difference between us and the SaaS solutions: We don't require any change to their systems and operations. Everything we do literally cuts cost off the equation. The rest of them you're talking about software changes, you're talking about everything [customers] don't want to do.