Rimini Street, a pioneer in enterprise software third-party maintenance, is steering a new course, having recently released Rimini Govern for AI, a managed service said to help IT leaders hasten and moderate artificial intelligence (AI) agent deployment. The service is intended to reduce risks and overheads, and to provide greater visibility into agentic processes.
With agentic AI having become both an overwhelming opportunity and governance challenge for IT teams, the Las Vegas-headquartered company is, unsurprisingly, not alone in wanting to provide a control plane to govern new swarms of agents and sub-agents that traverse IT systems, applications and infrastructure. But, having made an initial pivot 18 months ago, the move continues a stride away from its heartland in providing alternatives to vendor support for customers of Oracle, SAP, VMware and other software heavyweights.
“You buy it as a service and don’t worry about 20 pieces of software being brought together in a solution,” CEO Seth Ravin said in a briefing with Computer Weekly.
Maintaining options
Rimini Street’s role as a challenger to software maintenance and support offerings has proven an attractive and persistent choice for CIOs that don’t want to pay the premiums of software giants. At the same time, Rimini Street has attracted legal challenges such as the epic Oracle lawsuit that seemingly concluded last year.
Despite this, the third-party maintenance formula has seen Rimini Street move towards annual revenues approaching $0.5bn. Its second quarter saw revenues swell to $111.1m.
Ravin believes that with cloud, microservices, headless and open application programming interfaces (APIs) prevalent, there is less reason than ever to be at the behest of those giants.
“ERP software is dead,” he added. “We always said it was going to break into pieces. It’s a very, very different time in software and there’s a reason for that. Customers don’t understand what they’re buying from these companies and what they’re going to be producing in five years’ time.”
New world
Ravin sees the agentic AI service as a “transition to innovation” from cost saving. But there are similarities with its maintenance roots in a fiscal sense as AI adopters suffer from “tokenmaxxing”, running up large bills, including from unsanctioned “shadow AI” usage.
Constellation Research CEO and long-term Rimini Street follower Ray Wang called the agentic move “a no-brainer” that complements the company’s depth of support and knowledge of enterprise processes.
The move is also aligned with Rimini Street’s recent focus on providing ways for customers to layer AI services over ERP and other big-ticket investments such as ServiceNow.
“You can have hundreds of agents running around your organisation,” Ravin said. “You have an HR department to ensure people have access where they need access and it’s no different with ‘electronic people’ [AI agents]. But most people haven’t got that far with their understanding. We’re going to play security guard to the HR department.”
Ravin believes there is a “house of cards collapse” coming to AI pricing as Chinese and open-source models promise to dramatically reduce the cost of tokens. He said this will lead to “the fastest race of commoditisation we’ve ever seen. Just like open source databases have eaten into the paid database world … you’re going to see a commoditisation of LLMs [large language models], the brains behind every agent.”
This “tech war of our lifetime” will spawn a proliferation of cheap agents that will challenge regulatory compliance efforts too. Ravin suggested that companies already struggle to keep up with enterprise software version changes and upgrades. But there will be a moment “like in The Matrix where he takes the pill and sees what’s going on. Today we’re watching people wake up.”
Nibbling at the ERP edge
ERP is changing but Ravin doesn’t see contemporary phenomena such as vibe coding leading to build-your-own ERPs; but he agrees that changes may see a nibbling at the edge of software behemoths’ ecosystems.
“I see a hybrid environment,” he said. “You can’t vibe-code 10,000 key processes an SAP system delivers today … but I can create small apps and homegrown components.”
And with litigation seemingly a thing of the past, Ravin believes that prospects and partners will no longer regard his company as a “black sheep” of the industry. He pointed to a tightening of its relationship with ServiceNow, stating that this and the closure with Oracle can foreshadow a broader ecosystem. That, he suggested, will delight Rimini Street’s 4,700 clients and other watchers who were previously cautious of stepping out from the giants into a legalistically uncertain space.
Any significant advance could attract potential purchasers – after all, SAP bought erstwhile Rimini Street TomorrowNow over 20 years ago. Ravin may have waved off such a suggestion, but it’s clear that Rimini Street is attempting to spread its wings and source new revenues separate to the maintenance sector it helped create. That is a shift that could attract both new logos for its sales roster as well as greater wallet share from the 4,700-strong faithful.
