Rimini Street has just introduced Rimini Govern for AI, a Governance-as-a-Service managed service to be delivered 24/7/365 through Rimini Street’s Global Command Centers by expert AI engineers. This, it is posited, will help organizations:
Accelerate AI agent deployment.
Reduce AI agent operational risk.
Increase visibility into AI agent activity.
Provide AI agent activity audit capability.
Control AI agent operating costs.
Measure business value from AI agent investments.
Scale AI agent adoption confidently.
Organizations will be able to deploy AI agents and scale AI agent operations with confidence, argues CEO Seth Ravin, arguing:
Organizations today are under increasing pressure to innovate and modernize their enterprise systems while managing cost, risk and disruption. Many are finding that large-scale ERP replacements are expensive, time-consuming and often fail to deliver the expected business value. Real innovation is not about installing a software vendor’s next .ai release. It’s about reducing total operating costs, improving profitability and enhancing competitive advantage.
The pitch from RImini Street is straightforward:
We help organizations achieve these goals by avoiding unnecessary ERP software upgrades, migrations or re-platforming, and instead deploying Rimini Street’s innovative Agentic AI ERP solutions over the top of existing ERP software to deliver faster, better, cheaper and more agile ERP process execution, funded within the current IT budget.
We are helping more and more clients set a new vision, technical and functional path forward from their current vendor ERP software release, a path that does not require any return to the vendor for a future upgrade or migration to their current ERP software release in order to achieve innovation or modernization. The client can innovate and modernize their existing ERP software and other enterprise software using Agentic AI ERP solutions deployed easily, economically right over the top of their existing software releases.
We guide clients through this path using our proprietary and proven three-step methodology called the Rimini Smart Path. Our methodology is being used by clients to self-fund and accelerate innovation, especially AI and automation without undergoing costly, risky or unnecessary ERP upgrades or rip and replace migrations by leveraging and modernizing existing IT environments, all without operational disruption.
Examples of end user putting the Agentic AI ERP offering into production are increasing, says Ravin:
It’s been a very, very interesting progress as we’ve rolled these solutions out. We’ve learned a lot about the technology. We’ve learned a lot about how to solve very specific business issues…We’re watching a good number of them already in production. I think a good number of them are already working to expand, some of them are already working on next projects, multiple next projects. We’re now expanding that project out even more because we have the new solutions and the new Rimini governance solutions that we have clients who have been waiting to deploy.
Dog food time
For its part, Rimini Street is ‘eating its own dog food’ when it comes to AI adoption. Ravin explains:
When you talk about internal usage and deployment of AI, we, like everybody else, are looking for good use cases. We’re using it for Sales. We’re using it to gather broad amounts of information about prospects very quickly and present it in a way that Sales reps can see what’s happening at the prospect before they ever pick up the phone and call them. That’s certainly a huge improvement in time and productivity.
We also, of course, use tools like Clari, which are excellent in the Sales side on top of Salesforce to be able to understand and predict close rates. It’s very accurate. We can deploy tools in that part of the pipeline management, and it also allows us to aggregate very large views of what’s happening when you have sellers all over the world, working different types of transactions. It makes it much easier to manage at a very large level. And of course, we’re using AI in Finance.
I think overall, you look at the more thoughtful way that we’re using it, not just AI all over the place, we will achieve a meaningful reduction in total operating costs and more leverage as we move forward in the coming years.
Life after litigation…
As Ravin contemplates the next steps for Rimini Street, it’s with the long shadow of ongoing litigation with Oracle behind it. That’s a big positive, he admits, but it’s not the only upside:
There’s no doubt that our change in the world of litigation, our change in the world of putting in AI services , and the evolution into being an innovation company have driven a lot more customers to us. I think there are other elements. Number one, the fact that we are now giving customers a path where they can leave the vendor’s maintenance, forgo upgrades, and go on a path that has innovation and modernization in it, where they do not have to think about a potential return to the vendor’s road map at some point down the line, has been a game changer in terms of overall demand generation.
In fact, he adds:
There are deals that we lost years ago where customers said, ‘We love the support, we know we’re going to get better service, but we’re just afraid to leave the vendor’s path because we think we might have to go back someday’. Now, that’s changing. We have several [customers] that have signed with us because now they’re confident they don’t need to make that return trip to the vendor, the boomerang effect that some referred to I think that, that is the single biggest driver of the top of the funnel.
…and SAP evolution
There are some other macro issues, he adds, citing SAP’s setting of deadlines on support for certain products:
We have all sorts of release deadlines happening in the software world, and those deadlines are driving customers to seek other alternatives to extend the life of their products because they’re not ready to make a change. They don’t see the value and they feel like they’re being pressured from every angle. Those things combined, I think, are creating a much higher top of the funnel experience.
The latest development to be factored in among the SAP base is last month’s European Union deal to make it easier for customers to mix-and-max maintenance and support services. Ravin says:
When you look at the decision, the agreement in Europe with SAP, I think this is really bigger than SAP. I think this is more along the lines that software licensing is getting extremely complex. We’re connecting systems all over the place, all of us are. This is the new world – it’s an integrated environment. How do we integrate what we’re allowed to move? With data moving between places, licenses get brought together, they get separated, companies are merged, companies are separated.
A lot of the points that were raised and agreed upon between SAP and the European Union really were around some of these challenges that companies have with their licenses and what we might consider to be fair or unfair practices. They’re not uncommon. It’s just that these challenges are really impacting people’s ability to run their business.
He gives the EU agreement with SAP a partial thumbs-up:
Of course, they’re not everything we all would have wanted, but I do think that there’s positives in there. For example, the ability if a company splits apart and has to split its licenses, or has to merge and come together with another company, there are provisions about not being able to over-charge for the cost of that merger, not being able to hold people hostage around taking things apart and moving them back together. That does have a downward downstream impact on people like Rimini Street and other third-party providers and other IT providers who will see this as a big benefit because it increases the overall competitive environment and allows customers much more choice.
My take
The weight of lifting that multi-year Oracle legal burden is obvious, while recent developments in the SAP world also bode well for Rimini Street’s prospects as it pitches its Agentic ERP services future.