Third-party provider Rimini Street wants to provide customers with choice and flexibility through trusted local relationships. The aim is to work with providers like Datacom, announced towards the end of September, and offer its SAP and Oracle support as part of a broader technology partnership.
In an interview with ARN, Rimini Street GVP and regional general manager A/NZ, Shirley Riddick said pressure from vendors to upgrade was one of the key issues that led to its reseller partnership with Datacom.
“It was key timing for us to establish a partnership,” she explained. “We know that some vendors have mainstream support nearing end of life in 2027, with options to extend through to 2030.
“I’m just using that as one example, so I’m not picking on any particular vendor.
“There are these imminent dates positioned in front of customers, and there’s a lot of AI fatigue in the market.”
She told ARN that customers are confused about how to invest or where to invest, and how to find the funding on technology that will be “transformative for their business”. While ensuring it doesn’t “cost them what an ERP upgrade would cost”.
“We really want to be able to give customers optionality and the ability to execute on their own timeline without having to match a vendor’s roadmap,” Riddick said. “We want to give customers choices.
“We want them to decide where they want to invest, and we want them to be able to selectively choose the right business cases that are going to move the needle for them within their businesses.
“It’s really about having options and doing things in their own time frame when they are ready to do them.”
There is a need, according to Riddick to dispel some of the belief that the only way to get AI into the business is by doing the upgrade.
“That certainly is not the case, and it’s not what we’ve seen with our existing customers,” she added. “They’ve been able to stabilise and support their core ERP, the system of record, and then layer an agentic AI process specific on top of the existing ERP.
“There’s certainly a way to modernise, to transform an ERP environment, and to keep up with the times and gain the productivity gains through using AI without having to upgrade an ERP system.”
According to Riddick one of the most important things which Rimini discusses around security and governance for AI. As well as having the right guardrails in place to know exactly what the agent is doing; and ensuring there is audit records, an understanding of exactly what is happening.
“I think that’s something that could catch all of us, and it has been catching some of us,” she explained. “When it comes to security, there’s an old-school mentality that the only way to keep your ERP secure is to patch and that sort of thing.
“If you think of how quickly an agent could penetrate a system, patching is actually something of a thing of the past.”
Securing the environment is what comes first, noted Riddick. That’s more important then, obviously, breaking down the distinction between AI and automation.
“A lot of organisations are looking at it and going, ‘okay, we want to use AI for that’, but it’s not an AI process — it’s an automation process,” she explained. “Which is something that can easily be done as well.
“It’s just guiding them to exactly where the benefits and the wins are going to be, whether it’s automation, AI, or process reengineering.”
The latter, explained Riddick, is also something that Rimini Street is doing.
“Layering AI, automation, or an agent onto a broken process is only going to make the broken process go faster and be more dangerous,” she said. “Process reengineering is the very first step.
“[Then] get the process right, automate what needs to be automated, and then use an agent to work across that.”
Providing detailed understanding to customers is important as they run the ‘full spectrum” of the very risk-averse, who don’t want to move in that direction, which is fine, said Riddick.
Then, right through to those that are desperate highlight that they have invested in AI.
“What I see is that companies are actually challenged to demonstrate where the ROI is,” Riddick observed. “It’s a very difficult thing to prove because, if you’ve gained productivity gains, okay, cool, something’s going 10 per cent quicker.
“Where does that translate into a line item on the P and L [profit and loss] line. Where are we going to see that?
“That is the real question because what we are seeing is the cost of tokens rising, and the cost of using it is rising. It’s such an interesting time to be in this space.”
This is why partnering with MSPs like Datacom becomes vital in being able to give customers one-on-one help when they need.
While Rimini Street has 24/7 support, having local support or guaranteed response times is vital for local Australia and New Zealand customers, explained Riddick.
“I think we certainly will look to partner with other organisations where there is a suitable fit,” she said. “We will be very selective and careful about how we do that because, when you enter into a partner agreement, you don’t want to flood the market with too many partners.
“It’s not good for the companies that we do partner with, and it isn’t good for us. But we do have a lens on establishing strong, strong partnerships with key strategic players where we’ve got a good fit with each other.”
According to Riddick, Rimini Street is bringing its services, and it’s something that organisation doesn’t necessarily offer.
“They’ve got services that are offered around what we do,” she said. “It’s always where there’s a really strong fit, but it is a focal area for us going forward.”
That customer-first focus also shapes how Riddick also approaches emerging technologies such as AI.
She joined the organisation five months ago and prior to that had spent 20 years in the ERP space.
“I started my journey as an Oracle consultant and then, back in 2006, I joined a company called Excel4apps,” she explained. “Which was a bit of a disruptor in the Oracle market because they pulled GL balances directly into Excel using a little connector.
“I have had my eye on Rimini Street since 2006 because they were also this disruptor in the market.”
According to Riddick it’s a pretty small market and knew about it back then and had followed them since then.
“What drew me to Rimini Street was really the customer centricity of the company,” she said.