Rimini Street Hires SAP Execs as TomorrowNow Expands Operations
October 16, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Ever since Oracle ate PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards, a number of companies have been trying to make money by offering alternative technical and update support for the PeopleSoft and JDE ERP suites and the Siebel CRM suite. One of them was TomorrowNow, which was founded to offer alternative support for PeopleSoft applications and then expanded to offer JDE support; TomorrowNow was acquired by SAP in January 2005, and has been trying to give Oracle’s new customer base some grief. Another alternative support provider chasing Oracle customers is Rimini Street, which was founded to offer support to the Siebel stack, but which has expanded to offer support for PeopleSoft and JDE software. Last week, Rimini Street, which is headquartered in Las Vegas, hired away two of the earliest employees of TomorrowNow, who were also key employees at PeopleSoft way back when. George Lester has been hired away from TomorrowNow to manage all of the technology specialists in the support operations for Rimini Street’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JDE support offerings. Lester was in charge of PeopleSoft support at TomorrowNow, and was previously a key developer at PeopleSoft, holding the positions of infrastructure manager, software architect, and senior database manager at different points in his career at PeopleSoft. The other key employee that Rimini Street has nicked from TomorrowNow is Beth Lester, who will oversee the support operations for the PeopleSoft ERP suite in particular at her new job. While at TomorrowNow, she managed the updating of more than 500 tax and regulatory updates that were necessary to keep the PeopleSoft suites up to date. She is also a former PeopleSoft employee, and was a consulting leader on implementations and upgrades. Because synchronicity is a funny thing, just as the two Lesters were leaving TomorrowNow, that company’s president and chief executive officer, Andrew Nelson, was opening a new headquarters in Bryan, Texas. Nelson said that he started his business eight years ago on a single server running on his kitchen table, and he would never have believed that it would grow to have 200 clients using the Siebel, JDE, and PeopleSoft software packages from 37 countries. He also thanked the Research Valley Partnership, which makes investments in the area (which is where Texas A&M University is located) for helping him with funds in 2002 to help expand TomorrowNow. Presumably SAP picked up the tab for the new digs. The question now is when some other player will try to buy Rimini Street–and don’t be too surprised if it turns out to be SAP’s TomorrowNow unit. RELATED STORIES Rimini Street Offers JDE Support Services TomorrowNow Upset at Quest User Group TomorrowNow Opens Pleasanton Office JDE Shops Have Plenty of Options for Third-Party Maintenance |
