Rimini Street does not write enterprise software and does not sell a new ERP stack. Its business is to step into a narrow but expensive part of the market: maintenance and support for older Oracle and SAP systems that companies still rely on.
The article says the pitch is straightforward. A customer buys Oracle or SAP software, then keeps paying annual maintenance fees to the original vendor. Rimini Street offers to take over that support work at roughly half the cost.
Why the maintenance market exists
The piece uses Oracle to show the economics. If a company pays $1 million for an Oracle software license, it may then pay 22% of that amount each year in maintenance, or $220,000 starting in the second year. That fee, according to the article, can rise by 4% to 8% a year. On that basis, five years of maintenance on a $1 million license can add up to more than $1.3 million, exceeding the original license purchase.
Companies can stop paying, but the tradeoff is immediate. They lose access to security patches, regulatory updates, and technical support. For systems tied to finance, procurement, and supply chain operations, that is not a small risk.
The article draws a similar picture for SAP. It says about 35,000 companies worldwide still use SAP ECC. SAP introduced S/4HANA in 2015, yet more than half of those customers have still not moved. Migration can cost millions of dollars for a mid-sized company and as much as $1 billion for a large multinational, with projects taking 18 to 36 months.
For many customers, older systems remain stable enough to justify staying put. If finance runs, procurement works, and supply chains keep moving, the business case for a costly replacement can be weak. That is the gap Rimini Street targets.
Seth Ravin’s long bet on legacy support
The article traces the idea back to Seth Ravin’s time at PeopleSoft in the 1990s, before Oracle acquired the company. Ravin, then a sales executive, helped create an extended support plan for customers whose systems were stable and who did not want to be forced into an upgrade.
In 2002, he co-founded TomorrowNow to do much the same thing for Oracle customers, charging about half of the original vendor’s rate for support. SAP acquired TomorrowNow in 2005. Ravin stayed only three months after the deal.
Oracle later sued SAP and TomorrowNow over copyright infringement. SAP ultimately paid $359 million, and TomorrowNow was shut down.
That same year, Ravin launched Rimini Street in Las Vegas. The business model remained largely the same. Oracle sued again in 2010, again alleging copyright infringement.
A 15-year legal battle with Oracle
According to the article, the Oracle case stretched across 15 years. In the first trial in 2015, Oracle brought 24 claims and prevailed on only one, with the court characterizing the issue as unintentional infringement. The article’s reading of that result is that Rimini had process problems, not a deliberate scheme to steal code.
In 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned more of the earlier rulings, and Ravin was relieved of most personal liability. The article highlights one line in particular: Rimini Street’s third-party support business was engaged in lawful competition with Oracle’s own direct maintenance services.
The dispute went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019. All nine justices ruled that Oracle had to return $12.8 million to Rimini Street.
The fight did not end there. In 2023, a federal judge in Nevada found repeated infringement tied to the PeopleSoft line and issued a new injunction.
By July 2025, the two sides reached a final settlement. Oracle returned $37.9 million in legal fees, according to the article, and Rimini Street agreed to leave the PeopleSoft product line, which the piece says generated about $20 million in annual revenue. Its core Oracle database and SAP-related business was described as unaffected.
The sales case: lower prices and broader support
The article presents Rimini Street’s value proposition in two parts. First, price. Oracle’s annual maintenance charge is described as 22% of license cost, with yearly increases of 4% to 8%. Rimini Street, by contrast, charges about half and generally does not raise prices the same way.
Second, scope. Vendor maintenance often does not fully cover highly customized code that customers have built up over many years. The article says Rimini does cover that. It also says that for top-priority incidents, Oracle does not offer a specific response guarantee, while Rimini promises a response within 10 minutes and averages under two minutes in practice.
Several customer examples are cited. Welch’s, the U.S. beverage brand, switched after its CTO found Oracle EBS maintenance costs were taking up an unreasonable share of the IT budget. Based on a Rimini case study cited in the article, the first year’s savings were roughly equal to one-quarter of the company’s net income for that year.
The article also names Khimji Ramdas, Oman’s largest private conglomerate. Its SAP environment included more than 700 custom modules, making a full replacement far more difficult. A technology executive at the company is quoted as saying the organization should have moved to Rimini earlier and that total maintenance costs fell by 80% after the switch.
AUTOBACS, described as Japan’s largest automotive aftermarket retailer, has worked with Rimini Street for 10 years. The article says its system did not crash during that period and that savings were redirected into AI and Internet of Things projects.
Maintenance is the entry point, not the whole business
The article argues that Rimini Street is not just handing savings back to customers and stopping there. Maintenance is the opening move. Once a client switches support providers and reduces its bill, Rimini can sell a wider set of services around the same legacy environment.
Those services include Rimini Manage for day-to-day operations, monitoring, security, and system integration; Rimini Connect for compatibility between older systems and newer environments; and Rimini Protect for security coverage on aging platforms. The article says Rimini Protect is backed by 75 security experts working around the clock.
The company is also pushing AI on top of existing systems rather than replacing the underlying ERP. The idea is to add AI capabilities for tickets, reconciliations, and approval flows while leaving the original software in place.
The article says Rimini Street worked with ServiceNow on 20 templates that have already gone live at 26 customers.
One example comes from Apsen, a pharmaceutical company in Brazil. The article says Apsen did not want to move off SAP, so Rimini helped deploy ServiceNow AI workflows on top of its legacy setup in a matter of weeks. A material transfer process that had required staff to handle more than 100 requests a month and move over 50,000 finished products through emails and spreadsheets saw 70% of manual work automated. Development time dropped from months to weeks.
A new form of lock-in
The article’s broader point is that Rimini Street may be dismantling one kind of vendor lock-in while building another. First, it helps customers cut spending on original-vendor maintenance. Next, it encourages them to spend part of those savings on Rimini-managed services, security products, and AI tools. As more of those layers are added, the cost of leaving Rimini rises.
On the numbers cited in the article, that model is working. Customer retention is about 90%. Total contracted revenue not yet recognized reached a record $653 million. International business grew 14%.
Still, the piece says this new lock is not as strong as the one controlled by the original software vendors. A key weakness is security patching. Rimini’s approach is described as “virtual patching,” which adds an external protective layer rather than fixing the code itself. For tightly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, the article says that may not satisfy audit requirements.
There is also the cost of reversing course. According to the article, customers that want to return to Oracle can face retroactive maintenance charges equal to 150% of past support fees, with SAP taking a similar approach. Savings collected over several years could disappear in one move back to the vendor.
Growth pressure and the cloud threat
The article says Rimini Street’s latest earnings report showed order value down 8.8% year over year. It also says liabilities exceed assets and net assets are negative. The sales organization has been split into two groups, one focused on new logos and the other on renewals and existing accounts.
At the same time, Oracle and SAP are moving customers toward cloud services. In a SaaS model, control over the software license remains with the vendor, leaving customers with far less room to separate software ownership from support choice. In the old model, a company could buy software from one provider and hire another for maintenance. In the cloud model described in the article, that option can disappear.
The article frames the situation as a race between two forms of lock-in. Rimini Street relies on service stickiness and accumulated operational dependence. Oracle and SAP rely on architecture and delivery model changes that can make exit much harder from the start.
From Oracle and SAP to VMware
The same approach is now being applied beyond ERP. The article says that after Broadcom acquired VMware, perpetual licenses were canceled and prices rose sharply. Rimini Street launched VMware support services in 2024 and signed more than 100 contracts in less than a year and a half.
In the article’s telling, Rimini Street has now tested its model against Oracle, SAP, and VMware ecosystems. The thesis has stayed consistent: software licenses and long-term maintenance do not have to be bundled into one relationship.
The China question
The article closes by drawing a parallel with China’s enterprise software market, mentioning Yonyou and Kingdee customers as facing similar forms of lock-in under domestic technology substitution policies and cloud migration. Yet it also notes that China still does not have its own version of Rimini Street.
This article was originally published by the WeChat public account Wang Zhiyuan, ID Z201440, and credited to author Wang Zhiyuan. It ends without resolving which model ultimately gives customers more freedom, but it makes clear what is at stake: whoever controls maintenance, integration, and AI layers can shape the next round of enterprise software dependence.