Rimini Street Says JD Edwards Support Business Quadrupled Last Year

May 12, 2009 Alex Woodie

New software license sales may be down across the board. But that’s not hurting business on Rimini Street, the provider of third-party maintenance and support for JD Edwards and other ERP suites. Last week at the Collaborate 2009 conference in Orlando, Florida, the company announced a quadrupling of JD Edwards-related business, and unveiled a plan to pump millions of dollars more into its JD Edwards business in the hopes of attracting more customers dissatisfied with Oracle‘s support.

With Oracle charging annual maintenance fees in mid to high 20 percent range, many JD Edwards shops with old and stable ERP systems may be receptive to getting their maintenance support from a third-party provider. Of course, these shops will be forgoing the types of enhancements that Oracle also delivered last week at Collaborate 2009, including a new release of World and new tools for EnterpriseOne. But many customers only need annual tax updates and the occasional bug fix, making business for Rimini Street and several such companies providing third-party maintenance and support services.

Since it augmented its support for SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel enterprise software suites with support for JD Edwards ERP products several years ago, Rimini Street has reported a steady increase in the number of customers. In fact, the JD Edwards customer base increased fourfold from 2008 to 2009, the company says, and customer renewal rates remain over 90 percent.

Seth Ravin, president and CEO of Rimini Street, addressed the growth of his JD Edwards business. “Because of the success and fast-paced growth of our JD Edwards client base and to meet surging demand for our support services, Rimini Street will further its commitment to JD Edwards clients with a multi-million dollar expansion of our global JD Edwards support capabilities,” he says in a press release.

That expansion includes the “aggressive hiring” of “many additional” JD Edwards experts, Rimini says.

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Do the Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting for Cost Savings

COVID-19 has accelerated certain business trends that were already gaining strength prior to the start of the pandemic. E-commerce, telehealth, and video conferencing are some of the most obvious examples. One example that may not be as obvious to the general public but has a profound impact on business is the shift in strategy of IBM i infrastructure from traditional, on-premises environments to some form of remote configuration. These remote configurations and all of their variations are broadly referred to in the community as IBM i hosting.

“Hosting” in this context can mean different things to different people, and in general, hosting refers to one of two scenarios. In the first scenario, hosting can refer to a client owned machine that is housed in a co-location facility (commonly called a co-lo for short) where the data center provides traditional system administrator services, relieving the client of administrative and operational responsibilities. In the second scenario, hosting can refer to an MSP owned machine in which partition resources are provided to the client in an on-demand capacity. This scenario allows the client to completely outsource all aspects of Power Systems hardware and the IBM i operating system and database.

The scenario that is best for each business depends on a number of factors and is largely up for debate. In most cases, pursuing hosting purely as a cost saving strategy is a dead end. Furthermore, when you consider all of the costs associated with maintaining and IBM i environment, it is typically not a cost-effective option for the small to midsize market. The most cost-effective approach for these organizations is often a combination of a client owned and maintained system (either on-prem or in a co-lo) with cloud backup and disaster-recovery-as-a-service. Only in some cases of larger enterprise companies can a hosting strategy start to become a potentially cost-effective option.

However, cost savings is just one part of the story. As IBM i expertise becomes scarce and IT resources run tight, the only option for some firms may be to pursue hosting in some capacity. Whatever the driving force for pursing hosting may be, the key point is that it is not just simply an option for running your workload in a different location. There are many details to consider and it is to the best interest of the client to work with an experienced MSP in weighing the benefits and drawbacks of each option. As COVID-19 rolls on, time will tell if IBM i hosting strategies will follow the other strong business trends of the pandemic.

When we say do the math in the title above, it literally means that you need to do the math for your particular scenario. It is not about us doing the math for you, making a case for either staying on premises or for moving to the cloud. There is not one answer, but just different levels of cost to be reckoned which yield different answers. Most IBM i shops have fairly static workloads, at least measured against the larger mix of stuff on the public clouds of the world. How do you measure the value of controlling your own IT fate? That will only be fully recognized at the moment when it is sorely missed the most.

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