Rimini Street Gets Equity Investment from Adams Street

July 21, 2009 Alex Woodie

Rimini Street, a third-party provider of software maintenance and support for JD Edwards and other enterprise software packages, last week announced that it has sold a portion of the rapidly growing company to Adams Street Partners, a private equity firm with nearly $20 billion under management. Rimini says it will use the money to expand in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Las Vegas-based Rimini Street says business has been booming lately. While the global recession has punished enterprise software companies by putting the kibosh on new ERP projects, the gloomy financial outlook has actually been a boon for third-party maintenance firms like Rimini, which charge a fraction of what ERP vendors charge for tax and regulatory updates and basic support services.

Rimini says its revenue quadrupled over the first six months of 2009 (a claim for which we can only take Rimini’s word, as the company is privately held and not required to disclose truthful financial figures). During that time, the company says it has expanded its workforce in the United States by almost 25 percent and opened its first offices overseas. It also began offering support for SAP software installations, in addition to previously supported Oracle products, including JD Edwards (World and EnterpriseOne), PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Siebel CRM.

Now, to foster the type of growth overseas that it’s experienced in the U.S., Rimini is tapping the ample reserves of Adams Street to fund its international expansion. Adams Street is a private equity firm with headquarters in Chicago, Illinois; Menlo Park, California; London; and Singapore. The company has been investing in companies in a variety of ways (direct investments, secondary equity, and fund of funds) since 1972.

Adams sees Rimini taking an even bigger piece of the third-party maintenance pie in the future, says Robin Murray, a partner with the firm. “Rimini Street is growing at an incredible pace and is the clear and dominant leader in the emerging third-party enterprise software support market,” Murray says in a statement. “We join the analyst community in believing that Rimini Street is leading the way in a new, multi-billion dollar market as enterprise software licensees look to maximize the return on their current software investments.”