Rimini Street is expanding its third-party software support portfolio significantly about a month after announcing it will soon become a publicly traded company. It will now offer support services for six additional database platforms, as well as a security service delivered in partnership with McAfee.
The company had already provided support for SAP HANA and Oracle database. Now it will also support IBM DB/2, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP ASE, SAP IQ, SAP SQL Anyhere and SAP Advantage Server.
As with its Oracle and SAP application support programs, the database support services will be offered at 50 percent lower cost than vendor maintenance. They will provide proactive health checks; technical services for integration and other matters; security services; and database performance tuning.
In its release, Rimini included a quote from existing customer Rodobens, a Brazilian company with divisions focused on banking, real estate, auto sales and more. Rodobens previously selected Rimini Street to support its SAP ECC 6.0 installation, which uses SQL Server as the underlying store. SAP has said it will support ECC 6.0 until 2025, but has been working to move customers to the next-generation S/4HANA suite, which only supports HANA as a database.
The four additional SAP databases Rimini will be supporting were gained through its 2010 acquisition of Sybase. While HANA has received most of SAP's investment and attention, the former Sybase databases have ample installed bases and SAP has made no public indications of sunsetting any of them.
Meanwhile, DB/2 and SQL Server remain widely used by the ECC 6.0 installed base, although Oracle has been the most popular choice for those customers historically.
Rimini Street is also getting into database security services using technology created by McAfee. It incorporates "virtual patching" to block attacks before they can reach a database instance, along with monitoring for vulnerabilities. Virtual patching provides a gateway that allows for attacks to be spotted and blocked without need to directly apply patches to the core database. This approach is superior to traditional patching methods due to its speed as well as alleviating the need for regession testing, Rimini says.
Rimini had long been expected to file for an IPO, but last month instead announced it was merging with GPIAC, an entity known as a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company). It was not a merger with another operating company but rather a merger "with a big pile of cash," as Rimini CEO Seth Ravin put it in a recent conversation with Constellation Research.
One reason for the move was a $124 million judgment Rimini had to pay to Oracle over an intellectual property lawsuit, which put a lot of debt on its balance sheet, Ravin said. Rimini expects to get some or even most of the $124 million back on appeal but that won't play out until the end of next year, he added.
The company sees a $81 billion total addressable market for on-premises maintenance, and the move into broader database support is an attempt to get a bigger piece of that pie.
Rimini's fastest-growing product line of late has been Oracle database support, Ravin added. The company also sees a growth opportunity in offering premium SaaS maintenance.
The idea is to exploit the trend in which SaaS vendors sometimes require new licenses for additional functionality rather than including key new features in the monthly rent, angering customers, along with offering poor SLAs unless customers pay a hefty premium for higher-level support. Rimini sees an opportunity in offering its traditional level of high-touch support but at a reduced price compared to SaaS vendors, Ravin said.
Going forward, Rimini is going to ramp up user conference appearances, self-produced events and thought leadership speaking opportunities as its key marketing strategy going forward. "We don't want to be just the '50 percent off guys," Ravin said. Rather, Rimini wants to be seen as more of a consultative resource for CIOs jugging on-premises and cloud strategies.
POV: The ambitions laid out in Ravin's final comments will put Rimini Street in closer competition with the large systems integrators of the world. To date, those players have been loath to enter the third-party maintenance market lest they alienate the likes of Oracle and SAP, whose ecosystems provide ample revenue streams around implementation services, along with the type of strategic consulting Ravin outlines.
At the same time, for Rimini to gain credibility as a strategic consultant, it must also acquire expertise and offerings for a bigger slice of the IT budget, which makes the move into database support and security a logical step.
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