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Is your organisation spending too much on enterprise software support and struggling to innovate?
In this episode, we talk with Emmanuelle Hose, GM and Group Vice President of Rimini Street, about how Rimini Street is disrupting the traditional enterprise software support model. Emmanuelle explains why many organisations are looking for alternatives to expensive vendor support and forced upgrades. She details how Rimini Street provides end-to-end support for a wide range of enterprise applications, including Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and VMware, helping clients save significant money (up to 90% on total support costs) and free up budget for innovation.
Discover how Rimini Street allows businesses to maintain their existing on-premise systems for 15+ years without mandatory upgrades, while also enabling them to leverage cutting-edge technologies like AI on top of their current infrastructure. This approach offers increased agility, greater control over IT spend, and the freedom to innovate on their own terms. This is an episode you won't want to miss.
Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success.
For more details contact leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au
Full Episode Transcript:
(Intro Music with Voiceover)
Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started.
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Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone. It's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, and I'm thrilled to have Emmanuelle Hose, GM and Group Vice President of Rimini Street in the studio today. Hi, Emman. Thanks for joining me.
Emmanuelle Hose: Hi Leanne. Thanks for having me.
Leanne Taylor: You're most welcome. Now, this is a conversation I've been very keen to have with you. Uh, we've known each other for a while. And for my customers out there that haven't heard of Rimini Street, who are you? What do you do? And why do my customers need to know you?
Emmanuelle Hose: Excellent. Thank you so much. Yes. Appreciate the opportunity again. So, Rimini Street is an end-to-end uh support and services organisation for enterprise software. So, if you think about any organisation in the world, they all run an enterprise software to run their operation, right? So, it's a piece of software that run your finance system, your HR system, supply chain, inventory, if you are producing good or or selling any types of good, right? Large organisations tend to run enterprise applications such as Oracle and SAP and Microsoft, you know, this big mammoth uh software that really are the foundation of their business and their whole system. So, very critical for them. But the problem is that they're very expensive to run. 20 years ago, we'd realised that organisations were paying far too much money and time and resources really supporting this application. We realised that there was no alternative, right? So if you wanted your software to be supported, you had to go back to the vendor to have the support. And the support they have, obviously help desk and people helping them with any problem they may have, but also innovation, right? So, the ability to be able to upgrade and and this kind of things. Uh but there was no alternative, and as a result of that, this organisation was making about 94% profit margin on the maintenance, and so very business, right?
Leanne Taylor: That's some pretty big numbers.
Emmanuelle Hose: Yeah, it is, it is. So, that caused a number of problem for organisation that run this application. They just did not have enough money and to be able to innovate, right? And as you know, as an organisation, you have to innovate if you want to grow, but you have to also manage your cost if you want to be profitable. So, we decided to provide and create an industry that didn't exist, which was the industry of the third party for enterprise application, okay? So, that's what we did 20 years ago. So, very destructive. Uh we decided to change the model completely, and we decided to make it much more relevant to organisation. Everybody is customising this application, for example, right? And the vendor only support their core product. So, we decided to add customisation for no extra cost. We decided to support any version of the software they were running for 15 years plus, right? So, they didn't have to upgrade constantly to be supported. We wanted our clients to have the choice to upgrade if they saw there was a business benefit for it, and they were be able to benefit from innovation. If it's not the case, just stay where you are and do other things that is more valuable to your business, right? So, all in all, what happened is that we decided to do this for 50% cheaper of the vendor, so being able to give money back to our clients straight away for them to be able to fund innovation strategy. And because we're providing a bigger scope of support, our clients tend to save about 90% on the total cost of supporting this application every year, right? So, it's quite significant, right? So that they have more money, they have more resources, they have more time because they don't have to do this upgrade constantly, and they can really spend all their time innovate for the business to be able to grow.
Leanne Taylor: So, Emman, tell me about the smaller end of town. So obviously, your large enterprises where you guys play. I do know, or I'm hoping you do, cover the the small to medium enterprise as well. What do you offer that space?
Emmanuelle Hose: We do as well. Well, it really depend on the product. So, for example, VMware. VMware, we found can be everywhere and anywhere, all size of organisation, public sector to private sector, and so on. So, we do support any size for this kind of organisation. We've got what we call a flex model, which will allow them to get access to support as well. So, we absolutely do that. And then we've even started supporting startups. Startups that are coming up with wonderful products that are growing very fast, but they don't know how to do support. And of course, if they can't support their clients very well, it doesn't matter how good the product is. So, we provide uh this same level of support, obviously a bit tailored there for them.
Leanne Taylor: Oh, that's fantastic. And lastly, on the Microsoft front, talk to me about the Microsoft support. And probably timely given there I think there was a little outage yesterday.
Emmanuelle Hose: That's right. That's right. Yes. So, we are expanding this area actually. We used to support mainly the database. Now we support 365, we support Azure, or the cloud, right? And when we talked about the cloud before, you know, as a platform, you know, the cloud infrastructure uh is something that we support. So, we support Azure as well, which is everywhere. So, we keep on growing and adding more solution to provide again a lot of freedom to our client and save them a lot of cost.
Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. And I was just looking on your website and I'm looking at Salesforce and Workday. There are ServiceNow. So, for customers out there that are looking at saving some money, if you have any of these applications, I'd definitely suggest you jump out and uh let us know and we'll have a chat with Emman around how they can possibly save you some money. So, maybe touch on that Emman in terms of your pre-sales or what a conversation with your team looks like. Is there a review or how how does that engagement work for a customer to understand what's possible with Rimini Street?
Emmanuelle Hose: Yes. So, in terms of providing support, uh it's quite simple. It's it's based on what you own today, what you're licensed for. Uh so, the evaluation is very simple. We ask that our clients share what they are licensed for, how much they're paying today, what version they are running, and very quickly we'll be able to put a proposal in front of them and we'll walk them through what it means to change.
Leanne Taylor: Break this down for me with an example. So, if I've got a customer that's an SAP customer, and they could be spending, you know, half a million dollars, a million dollars a year on their SAP licensing. Talk me through what that looks like for Rimini Street. So, the support is the same if not better with you guys. Explain that whole process for me.
Emmanuelle Hose: That's right. So, most organisations have two agreement with the vendor. They've got the license agreement, which entitle them to use the software for perpetuity. And they also have separate to that a maintenance agreement, right? The maintenance agreement is renewed on a yearly basis, and that's the piece that allow you to uh get access to support and get access to new functionality if the vendor continue to invest in this product. What is happening today is that most organisations are not investing in the product that they have on premise, right, with these two different agreement, and they are forcing their clients to go to the cloud. SAP, for example, have said to their client, by 2027, we won't support you anymore. You have to go to my new version of the product, either grow or rise. And organisations don't have the appetite to do that.
Leanne Taylor: So, instead, a new build, it's not an upgrade. That's a, is that a complete new?
Emmanuelle Hose: It's completely new, exactly right. Exactly right. And you're talking about million, you know, SAP clients spend millions and millions every year maintaining this application. And an upgrade to rise can cost, you know, hundreds of million up to five years. So, it's very disruptive for an organisation in terms of cost, in terms of time, and resources spent, and not enough of innovation. So, we offer an alternative, right? People can buy time. Hey, I don't have to change now. But how about I save a lot of money and spend this money to innovate now? So, very, very relevant what's happening. And we now support hundreds of different application. So, not just Oracle, not just SAP, uh but also VMware and tons of other application. Why are we doing that now? If you think about the economy, right? Everybody is struggling, the cost of labour is increasing. We've got tariffs, we've got deglobalisation, right? Everybody's really struggling to uh continue to run the business and control their cost. At the same time, there's a lot of things happening around IT. I'm sure you've heard about AI, right? Everybody talks about AI.
Leanne Taylor: Oh, just not really.
Emmanuelle Hose: Yeah. And you have to use it if you want to control your cost. If you want to automate your processes, if you want to reduce your labour cost and be a lot more efficient and so on, right? So, you have to jump on the wagon. But uh what the software vendors tend to say is like, hey, if you want to leverage AI, you have to change to my new platform, right? What we are saying is there's a different way of doing it. So, we not only help our clients provide a better support and free a lot of budget, but we also help them self fund innovation and now we can help them innovate by bringing agential AI on top of their existing system, so you don't have to change them. You can do that on top of your system because your system is not that used to be called the technical debts, because it's no longer supported, because it's no longer secure, because it's no longer compliant, with Rimini Street, it becomes an asset that is fully depreciated and then you can just spend your time innovating instead.
Leanne Taylor: Oh, that's fantastic. So, my takeaway from that case was anyone that's got an on-premise application, SAP, Oracle, what have you, they don't have to move to the cloud with Rimini Street, they can keep it on premise. You can wrap your magic around it, and they're saving 50%, and that puts more money back in their pocket to do things that they need to do. That's exactly right. That is so good. Now, you also touched on something there around VMware. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Because we've done previous podcasts around VMware, and there's obviously the Broadcom acquisition um has left a lot of customers in a very tricky situation. Explain to us or my VMware customers what you do in that space.
Emmanuelle Hose: So, very similar here. So, when Broadcom acquired VMware, they decided again, we're not investing in this software this way. We're going to put you in a subscription model. So, they were asking their client, surrender your perpetual license that you own, right? For perpetuity. Surrender them, and I'm going to migrate that to a subscription model. I'm going to charge you a lot more for that. So, same thing, organisation were not getting anymore value for it, and the price was increasing quite significantly. So, we decided, no, this is an asset that you have. Keep it. We'll support you for 15 years, and we'll lower the price of having this system into your organisation. So, very, very similar model here. Again, our support is the same for any product globally. It's 24x7. It's very, very reactive to our clients. We answer the phone within two minutes over the last uh 20 years, and we average 4.9 out of 5 in client satisfaction.
Leanne Taylor: Oh, fantastic. So, I do want to go back to the very beginning and talk about the name. Can you explain Rimini Street, where you came from? Tell us about the company.
Emmanuelle Hose: It is an interesting uh name, I have to say. We are an American company. We are headquartered in Las Vegas. Uh we are very international, so we have offices uh everywhere. We support over 120 odd countries in the in the world, over 6,000 clients. But the name comes from a street in Las Vegas. Uh our CEO, founder, and chairman of the board, uh he was just on the phone trying to set up the company, and they were asking him for a name, and he just looked around and he saw Rimini Street, and he went, that's the name. So, um but I love the because it's unique, and it's also a journey that you take with Rimini Street, right? Some clients actually have created a a verb called, we're going to Rimini it. Why? Because when a CIO come to an organisation, you know, one of the first thing they need to do is like, well, what is my budget, Mr. CFO? What have you giving me? And then he realised, hang on a minute, 90% or actually nine, 91%, Garner's saying now, is consumed just to keep the light on. And you want me to do all this innovation? Your your business is crying for innovation and changes, and I don't have this budget. So, the first thing they do, they will call us and say, hey, can you support this application and help me lower the cost and free my budget, so I can go and do this really innovative thing that the board is going to want me to do.
Leanne Taylor: That is so good. So, in terms of a customer moving away from the vendor onto Rimini Street, can you touch on that process? Is that a a week? Is it a month? Is it a six-month engagement? Like how does that work from a?
Emmanuelle Hose: Yes. So, the change management component is very, very simple because basically uh the users will just call a different number or have a different portal to be able to access Rimini Street. So, in that is very, very simple. But we do recommend a three-month onboarding. What do we do during this time? The client is still under support from the vendor. So, he has uh the right to download software, the release note, the patch shares under their current maintenance agreement. So, we do all this archive for our client so that in the future, is they want to upgrade to a new version of their ERP or CRM or database. We support database as well. They will be able to do that. So, it's about three months, and then we start planning what tax, legal, and regulatory requirement changes are going to happen next year that we need to start developing. And then we're also going to take the time to put a remote access to their dev or QA environment, because that's how we provide support to our client directly there.
Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. That's amazing. That's so good. There is So, and I love that I think most of the customers that I've spoken to that are SAP or Oracle or or even Microsoft are not aware that your service is available and that Rimini Street is available. So, I'm very excited to maybe do some lunch and learns and some webinars with you coming into next year and uh connecting our customers with your fabulous team. And uh anyone that's listening, if you would like to know more, please reach out to us at Tailormade Sales, and I would have no hesitation having Emman jump on a call with you or her fabulous team. We do call her frenemies. So,
Emmanuelle Hose: Yes.
Leanne Taylor: I won't tell you what she called me, but No, it's a pleasure working with you and your team, and I'm really excited as what you're offering. I think it's amazing given that everyone's trying to save money at this point in time. So,
Emmanuelle Hose: Exactly right. Thank you very much, Leanna. Really enjoy working with you and uh look forward to doing a lot more together next year.
Leanne Taylor: Thank you. See you next time.
(Outro Music with Voiceover)
Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, and here at Tailormade Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time.
