娇色导航

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to this special tech industry edition of 娇色导航Leadership Live. I'm your host Maryfran Johnson, CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media, and the former editor in chief of 娇色导航magazine and events.

Today's episode is sponsored by Rimini Street, which has been providing expert software support services for enterprise systems for nearly 20 years.

Rimini relies on an experienced crew of senior in house engineers to help its more than 5,100 customers address their tech talent shortages, extend the life of their ERP investments, and support multi cloud strategies. Visit Riministreet.com to learn more.

We're streaming live to you right now on LinkedIn and also to our 娇色导航channel on YouTube. And we invite our viewers very cordially to join us in today's conversation by submitting questions of your own.

We have the editors watching the chat streams on both LinkedIn and YouTube and ready to pass your questions along to my guest. Today is Eric Helmer, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Rimini Street.

Eric is a tech industry executive with 25 years of experience delivering strategic corporate IT projects around the world. His enterprise track record includes designing and implementing technical complex initiatives across the US the UK, India, the Middle East, Singapore and Thailand.

He joined Rimini street six years ago as a Group Vice President of its Strategic Services Group, moving up to his current CTO role in 2021. As you'll hear more about in our interview, Eric's role is much more externally focused than the classic CTO job.

He reports directly to the Chief Executive Officer, and he's charged with advising Rimini Street's clients on a wide range of strategic initiatives that involve their enterprise software support and services needs.

Before joining Rimini he was a vice president at Velocity Technology Solutions where he led the application services team, and his broad consulting background includes several other executive business roles with firms such as Linium, ADI Strategies and the Hackett Group.

Today we're going to tap into Eric's expertise as a software industry insider who works directly directly and talks regularly with CIOs and CTOs across a wide range of company sizes and industries. Eric, welcome. Nice to have you here. Thank you. Great to be here.

All right, let's start in right away on my mysterious comment about your external CTO role at Rimini. This is I don't run into that very often. So what does your day to day job actually look like? What parts are more operational and insight focused? Versus customer facing? Yes.

So you're right, I am what we call an external Chief Technology Officer 100% externally facing.

So I have very little to do with internal operations like email systems and things that associate traditional CTOs with so my main role is to help our customers really plan out their journey when it comes to enterprise software and systems 3-, 5-, 7-year long kind of roadmaps of different options that they have to get the best use out of their, you know, ERP programs and systems.

You know, it's a very complicated market right now in the world of ERP. And I think CIOs today are really looking for agnostic help and guidance to show them what options they really have in this landscape.

CIOs, customers really understand what other customers are doing, and kind of bring together that a little bit of a thought leadership, and what the analysts are saying what's commonly going on in the industry.

Talking about things like Cloud and AI and cybersecurity and data integration, you know that I also speak a lot of events around the world and conferences, so I kind of share my learnings that I have with with the world in those events.

Well, it's much it sounds like your role is much broader than just talking support services and extending ERP life. Do you usually meet with CIOs and CTOs? Or are you talking with different parts of the business? Mostly at the executive level for my particular conversations?

And you're right, it's more about really this agnostic planning.

I think, you know, a lot of these CIOs are getting inundated with system integrators and vendors that are trying to tell them that they have no choice but to go down a particular path and then just looking for some agnostic advice that we call the Rimini Street family where all of our customers to kind of help one another out whether so that not any one 娇色导航is is in it alone and they get collectively the the learnings for what other options might be an element when it comes to this these software package.

Yeah. Well as the external CTO, what is your own organization? Like? Is it just you The Lone Ranger out in the market? Or do you have a team of other Eric like executives that are out there?

Because with that, you probably can't meet with all 5100 Plus customers around the world. So how does that look? Yeah, that's right.

So we have customer service specialists that handle the dedicated primary support engineers and customer service folks that reach out to all of our 5100 customers to ensure that they have a lifeline and the lifeblood and I have dotted lines all over the organization internally love to our product management and in the different verticals that we have inside of our company, because we are a multi product company as dedicated verticals along along with that.

But as far as any kind of official team that I have, I am kind of a lone ranger when it when it comes to that piece.

But I do have the leverage the entire breadth and depth of Rimini Street as needed to make sure that our customers get the right people at the right time. Yeah, it does sound like a fun job, like an individual contributor.

But now Now more grand scale, is it's very rewarding for me.

Because when you just see light bulbs going off of like, oh, my gosh, I didn't, I didn't know that or this is really a legitimate thing, or there's actually a different options that I can explore that are not forced to do certain things.

It's, it's very empowering to them. And it's, I find that very rewarding.

Tell me you had mentioned how the world of enterprise software is continuing to ramp up in complexity, is that because of the sheer number of vendor choices is that because of the weight and breadth of the major enterprise software vendors and all the SAS based options today, talk us through why it's gotten so much more complicated.

Yeah, it has been, it's gotten more complicated now than I've ever seen, really, in my career.

And when we talk about enterprise software, we're talking about ERP types of packages, you know, that's running HR, finance, you know, logistics, manufacturing, the back office types of stuff, like Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft, right, that kind of run those back office systems and, and those vendors today are, we all know, are really moving more to a subscription based service, they are, right, so So what they're so the issue is that, you know, folks that have had these on premise, ERP packages that they've customized, and they've made it their own, and they've used and they built it to the CEO stable platforms that they're running their business on today, you know, I've just become so mission critical.

And now a lot of these vendors are trying to convince these customers, these users of these systems, that suddenly those perpetual license investments that they made 15 years ago or so have now become worthless, and that they have to throw that all away, and then reimplement everything all over again, into their subscription base software as a service model.

And that is causing a lot of the complexity that we're seeing today, because people are really trying to figure out if that makes sense, or what other choices that they that they have.

Because to do, that reimplementation often means that you're walking away from the perpetual license investment that you that you made that you have access to. And now moving into more of a rented tenant model, right.

So I think some people are seeing is that it's kind of moving from a homeowner to apartment, and you lose a lot of your customizations along the way, because those pods are very cookie cutter, right, that's easier to maintain.

And there's really not a lot of new features and functionality in those subscription based models.

So to go through multiple years and 10s of millions of dollars to go through this complete reimplementation only to have the same similar or sometimes even less functionality, which we started is a very difficult project to justify for board of directors today.

The vendor pressures are are extreme and they're getting harder and harder. They're they're using end of life dates to be able to force people to do that. And are people are looking for options.

What was it that they can do in in lieu of these pressures and that's really been the biggest impact that I've seen in the industry for quite some time.

Well and when I think back to because before I was at 娇色导航magazine I was at Computerworld and I remember so many stories about you know, that forced march to the next upgrade like version 3.0 is going to give you everything version 10.5 is the one.

This though has gotten more complicated, because it's not just a forced upgrade of stuff you already have. It's essentially changing to homeownership from rent or changing from home ownership to a rental lease kind of situation. Yep, that's right.

And we all know the landlord controls the rent prices, right? Yes. Even if you're getting that super deal, right now, we do have to recognize it as a move in special, right? Yeah.

When the when the rent is up, and it's time to renew, you know, we know those those, those prices are going to just continue. And, and it's the lock in, right?

Because if you decide to maybe leave that program, or do something a little bit differently, you really don't take anything with you, you you, you're kind of really locked into that. So people are trying to figure out, hey, is this juice worth the squeeze?

What can I do to protect myself here? How can I accident if I need to accident later? And all those things that go along with that. So that's what we help.

I think our customers is just like, here's all the options so that you have all the data points to make the decision for your company, right?

Do you run into CEOs and boards that are also fearful of going against maybe they've got five major software vendors that essentially underpin their whole company, and you're essentially coming in with a renegade crew and saying, don't listen to that stuff about end of life, we can help you extend it.

Is there some worry? Do you run into that, that there will be a payback essentially, from the big software vendors? Because these are enormous companies. And you're right, you're getting people to think outside the traditional way of thinking, right?

And I was in that industry for 20, 30 years. And that's what we did. We upgraded every three years, we did this everything that was yeah, that was the playbook. Right. It was the that was that was the playbook.

But to be honest, we really didn't have much of a choice back then. Because you really only had the big four, or vendors that that to choose from. Now there's way too many other options. Many other things.

So the days of of relying on one single monolithic provider that claim to be all things to everybody are just simply over. So so that robotic leg traditional path that we've always been on, is being challenged.

Because now what we're seeing is people assembling a bunch of different best fit of feature fit solutions that go around.

The traditional ERP that is now becoming the new definition of the ERP is now the combination of all these things that have the best solution that's going to get those best business outcomes at the best price.

So so now it's changing the landscape of what is the new normal now and it's challenging those traditional models. Do you? Do you do people that you the CIOs that you talk to?

I would think that the fact that so many options exist right now would be working in their favor? That Because managing their vendors that even having vendor management offices and programs at the bigger companies, that's a keystone skill.

That's something that CIOs and CTOs had been doing pretty much since IBM started all this back in the 1960s. So doesn't this fact that there's so many more options? Open the world up more to them?

It sounds like you and you encounter a lot of very frustrated and fearful customers, but I may be misinterpreting that. Well, yeah, they Well, some of them are fearful. Yes, some of them are also mad, right?

They're lit on the vendor pressures that are making them do these projects that they don't, they don't want to do. And then you were right, of course. But you're right.

I mean, the industry is just changing, you know, way too fast that there's there's new products and services that are popping up all over the place that are best fit solutions to get really good targeted business outcomes.

And I cIose that are that are ignoring that fact, you know, are we're seeing a lot of changes in the office of the CIO, new people are being brought in because they're opening up their mind to these to these possibilities to be able to find a an agile way of doing modernization of it in such a way that you want to use a best fit solution to provide an outcome but with a full expectation that you can rip that out later if you if that doesn't is not meeting your needs anymore, or a new solution is better.

So that you can just take that piece out and replace it with something else without having to re architecture and redesign and redo everything in your entire enterprise. Because you want to just use that one little kind of nice.

So it's kind of a hub and spoke type of model. But you want to be able to be agile to plug things in and take things out as needed in a quick way without disrupting the entire business to make even the smallest change.

So there tried to put together a system where if you have a flat tire on the car, you can just simply change that tire, you don't have to abandon the entire car altogether and go build a whole new car just because the tire left flat, right?

So well think, put yourself, put a 娇色导航hat on right now. And you're facing this problem with all of the different options and the pressure from, say, your three biggest vendors that you know, it is time to move to our cloud based version, it's time to go online.

As a CIO, looking at all this, what are some steps you would take? I mean, other than of course, bringing Rimini Street in to solve all your problems. Let's set that one aside.

Think about kind of give advice with a 娇色导航hat on where you're like, here's some of the steps I would take because I know you've done a lot of business tech roadmapping, with your clients.

So talk through some of those, and maybe not basic steps, but kind of graduate school level, what should people be doing? You know, I learned a really great strategy late last year from a 娇色导航in Paris. This was a bland, new CIO.

So what's the first thing you have to do if you're brand new CIO? He's got to figure out what mess you just inherited. Right?

So So So what what this gentleman did is he had the team put out all the systems in the entire company, something like 400 or 500 systems and just put it in a spreadsheet, right? Yeah.

And what he did is he had the team categorize these systems into one of three categories, or buckets. So the first category we'll call a bucket a, is that is this system that is a transactional system. It's a back office system.

Gartner calls these systems that run it's just the systems that are mandatory that is needed, just to run the business. And then bucket b is, is this a system of differentiation?

Are we using the system in a way that is giving us a competitive advantage or an edge over our competitors? Maybe it's a patented solution, or maybe it's some sort of specialty that we have, and they don't, and giving us that edge?

And then this last bucket, which is bucket C is is this a system of innovation. So usually, this is the Wild Wild West, there's, there's engineers all over the place, trying to create a whole bunch of things, and they're gonna fail 99 times out of 100.

But if they get that one, that one out of 100, that really works, it could be a game changer for the company, or maybe even a game changer for the entire industry.

Oh, yes, for 500 systems, it's either categories, bucket a, bucket b, and bucket C, overlay the IT budget on top of it. So he's time to see how much time money and resources are spent on each one of these buckets. Wow, he found out.

And this is a really great exercise, I think, for anyone to do, whether you're an existing 娇色导航or new, what he found out was 95% of his time, money, resources, and people are spent on which bucket you think systems that run, I'll get a right.

So this is eye opening, I think when people are saying that only leaves 5% of the resources that I have at my event available to me to innovation and differentiation systems. And this is no longer acceptable anymore, right?

We're seeing it organizations are expected to be the tip of the iceberg, do drive innovation and growth and directly contribute to margins, and, and, and innovations and new profit and product introductions, right. So you cannot just have 5% of that budget over for the innovation and differentiation.

So as he started putting together his three to five to seven year roadmap, as we were helping helping him do that, what we're doing is taking incremental steps to start balancing those budgets out to start bouncing those buckets out.

So that and then as you can see, in each iterative project, you're able to see how that 5% You know, now goes to 10%. Now goes to 20%, and so on and so on.

So on that is now getting that IT department back in a little bit more of a of a front office standpoint, but as needed for IT departments today. So really great process to do that. And I would I would encourage folks to do that.

It's kind of eye opening. Yeah, I would think so. And probably a lot of CIOs might guess that it's 75 to 80% of their budget. But to find out it's 95% would be that would be quite a kick in the teeth these days, wouldn't it?

Well, and the in a way in a roundabout way.

What we're actually talking about here is what a lot of CIOs considered tech debt, their foundational legacy or I like the British term referred heritage systems were and they usually are those big back office systems, the ERP and you know, the financial systems and that sort of thing.

I would think one of the next steps would be looking at the idea that Maybe it's time to sell the home in a particular technology and move to a rental operation, they must be looking at all of those SAS based products. Where do you come in?

In those conversations? When you're talking with them? What kind of advice basics do you give them? Well, so to be a, we, there's a few things there, we want to be able to really define what tech debt is, okay?

And what it what it isn't, and right, because tech debt doesn't just mean old systems, right?

Tech debt means a system that is going to provide a challenge for us going forward to continue running it, or maintaining it, or integrating it or securing it, or things of that sort, right.

So if we eliminate the problems associated with tech debt through a future proofing type of type of program, and then re re remove the bad things associated with the word tech debt, and those things are no longer a problem, it doesn't, it's no longer tech debt.

And now we're future proofing a fit purpose system for what it's what it's designed to do.

Now, if we talk about software as a service, let's face it, where are we, we are in a world to where we are going to be buying software as a subscription based, going forward. That's just the world we live in. And we.

And so if you go and buy a net new piece of software, today, most likely you're going to be getting some sort of a cloud solution or some sort of subscription based. And that's perfect. And that's completely fine. Because that's really the choice that we have.

Where we struggle is for people that have had an on premise system for 20 years. And they've customized it, it's full of unique business rules, a unique business logic for unique data to that particular to that particular customer.

That is a goldmine of data, that, that when we bought it say 15 years ago, we did it with a 30 or 40 year long return on investment to justify that long spend. We're only halfway through that now.

Yeah, so so people want to figure out how to get the original value out of this as long as it is there as it possibly can.

So if you take the concerns of tech debt, you future proof what that is for, and knowing that you're going to get as much out of that investment as possible, but then extend beyond that, that ERP system for net new systems that you're going to get likely to subscription software as a service model.

Now you've become kind of an innovate around the edges as this whole thing moves together, all based on agility and acceptability and replace ability, right composable ERP structure to be able to, to move that together, that's how you protect against tech debt, but also we're able to modernize it will and viaggia, the lock in right, talk a little bit more about this composable approach?

Or is that is that just your term for different modules that say you squeezed out one piece of your financial system? And you decide you can do it with this SaaS based model for that one? Is that the sort of thing you're talking about?

Or is it something bigger, it's a little bit bigger than that it's a Gartner term. So they created it, but it's so you can think of it as the best breed model we had 2030 years ago, but I know that we're at work for a lot of things.

And we're still in a gray right.

So in so so really what this means is that is the again, the assumption that we can no longer run not rely on these four big main players to be one single monolithic provider to be all things for everybody to a particular company.

And anymore, it's just just not, we can't do that they're there, they just are too slow to innovate. And and we need to have a little bit more of that, again, modular based approach.

So for example, if the HR function in your ERP system is no longer working for you, then what you can do, especially if you have an on premise perpetual license, you can just cease to use the HR system out of that system and move that to workday or wherever you want to move that to.

And now you just now use best fit solutions for that particular function without having to rip out the entire ERP to start all over again, just because you need some incremental functionality in HR that was not not a four year so you can extend through bi through analytics through through AI platforms, on top of it, or industry specialist solutions that are going to be kind of put on top of it.

But but the idea of the composability is to recognize what the ERP is and more importantly, recognize what the ERP is not or maybe not Best in Class F if you come to the same conclusion that we've come to and that is ERP, while extremely mission critical.

It can never go down. It can't go down for a minute, a second an hour, right? It's extremely mission critical. It is otherwise commodity. You're not really doing anything different with your ERP either everybody else in the world, you're paying people close, you're closing your books every quarter.

It's not rocket science, it's not really magic here, you're not differentiating your company at all with your ERP innovating company at all with ERP, if you come to that conclusion with me, then you reduce the time, money and resources and importance that you put on the system, right.

And what customers are doing now is just taking that and getting it off their plate, because the support of that environment is easily able to get because it's not a differentiated intellectual property thing.

So people are outsourcing that to someone that they can rely on to provide mission critical services to make sure it's always up, always available, but it's off their plate, they're not even worrying about it anymore, because it's not really doing anything to move the needle for the company.

So that now that turn frees up their time, money and resources, and the people just start worrying about and looking at projects that actually move the needle for the company that's actually going to innovate, differentiate, contribute to revenue, and contribute to different revenue, and that accompany gins and all the great things that we need to get done there, especially in the world of these emerging technologies with AI and machine learning that if people are not starting down that path than they're already behind, and these ERPs are just becoming a time and money suck and distraction from the things that really matter from the company.

Right? Yeah. As you're talking about that, I was thinking about the way the outsourcing trends go in, you know, sine waves across the industry, you think back to in the 70s, and 80s, what was being outsourced 90s and early 2000s.

And then you get to today, and give us your view of the availability of competent outsourcers there to do this kind of work, versus some of the trends which are to insource and do more, you know, you remember when the trend was a big, outsource your helpdesk, and then it turned out that being able to be in more control of your helpdesk delivered a better end user experience.

So give us kind of your 30,000 foot view on the outsourcing industry as it applies to support enterprise support and services. Sure, sure. So a couple of things just to go back to the 娇色导航in Paris.

What he what he wanted to do is outsource bucket A, in-source bucket B and in-source bucket C. Okay. So that was that was … so if it's commodity, then we can get that outsourced intellectual property.

We want to keep that 100% internally that was kind of so I kind of liked that. I kind of liked that plan. But you know, there's outsourcers out there.

Outsourcing has been a thing for a very long time, but not all outsourcers are created equal right and you we you have to be very diligent on choosing which outsourcers that that you that you use, okay, like because you see the outsourcers where folks will just you know, outsource everything to you know, overseas, you know, they're an in profit business, they want to squeeze out those those margins.

Right. And that competes right to squeezing margins and good offering great customer service compete with one another, right? So you want to be able to find those outsources that can put their money in an awkward.

For example, at Rimini street, every single ticket that is filed with us, we send a customer satisfaction survey for that ticket for it from the person that opened up that ticket every single ticket and and we average a 4.9 out of five, five being the highest customer satisfaction return which is unheard of in almost any support business, especially enterprise software system support business.

And the reason why we can get those high customer satisfactions is because we put our money where our mouth is by bonusing, our engineers based on kindness customer satisfaction scores, it's the only way to make sure there's integrity all the way through the environment so that they are completely motivated to delight customers and be and be able to do that we also invest a lot in AI, in our helpdesk systems to make sure that we find the best engineer within about three seconds of a ticket being opened up, which is the reason why in high severity ticket we've got engineers logging into environments ready to roll their hand sleeves up and solve tickets in an average of 71 seconds all over the world in almost any language you can think of.

So that's the kind of level of support that are needed for these mission critical support systems. And these are the research that people are going to want to do when they're considering an outsourcing model. Yeah.

So essentially the customers that are considering this CIOs and CTOs looking into this should be asking about essentially the pedigree and the size of your tech team.

Tell us a little bit more about that the, the tech team at Rimini Street, the part of it is probably a bet a huge chunk of it is working directly with customers and being the support engineers. What about the rest of it? Tell us about the technology team.

Yeah, so there's 1000s of engineers that we have all over the world, it's a complete pile of a son a model. So that there's always there's always overlap.

You know, we always have multiple engineers that have a skill sets, to be to be able to handle any kind of issues or any kind of say, attrition or any kind of change in market conditions. So we're always put in there.

And then of course, it's all based on AI, as well.

So that as as that ticket comes in, it's finding the best engineer, and I think it's like 11 different dimensions, whether it's their their availability, their language skills, or skill sets, what their customer satisfaction score was the last time they interacted with that, with that client, and so on.

And within just a few seconds, we're able to find that the best engineer, and we treat them well. And to be honest, we pay them very well, as well. Most of our engineers come from x consulting, like I did.

And, and so they're they're used to doing those implementations as opposed to a lot of the vendors, they're, they're very low when folks that have never implemented anything, but they're just kind of doing a lot of the on the job training.

So we have very seasoned engineers, 2025 years experience that are that are in there. And also we log in to our customers systems, as opposed to just handing documentation where to go in and fix the problems, right then and there early.

So the teams are, they're very well put put together from a support standpoint, our customers have a primary support engineer, as well.

So they can call in and open up a ticket, they can email, open up a ticket, or they can call Joe, the primary support engineer that knows everything about their system, and get the support that they need without having to explain their environment all over again, and go through any kind of installation procedures or any sort of things.

So we take all of that factor out of the support just to create a much better experience. And we know our prices are 50 to 90% off of what vendors traditionally charge for their support as well.

And are you able to do that essentially deliver what you're saying is a higher quality of support for a lower fee? Because this is your primary focus, you don't have to worry about all the rest of that you're basically supporting services? Well, absolutely.

But really is there's nothing really secret or magical here about it. If you look at the public filings of these vendors, as far as what they're doing and support, you'll find that these vendors are averaging around 90 to 95% gross margin on their store business.

Okay, I don't know what your margins are, but I can guarantee you they're not 95%, and neither are ours. So we provide those kinds of services at a same margin, that's going to give a much more adequate level of support for these mission critical systems, right.

So there's something magical about it, we just hire the best people. So it's there's not we don't have the level one and escalate to level two and escalate to level three. It's all senior engineer. So we get there quicker, we get there faster.

We have the better business outcomes, we do it for a reasonable margin, and you're a publicly held company, so many of our listeners can go in and look at your numbers as well. Sure, yeah. Look it up.

Now, you mentioned when we talked earlier that you have a lot of conversations these days with Chief Risk officers rather than the head of technology, you get into the risk office. Tell us about why that's happening and what these conversations are like. Right.

So we do talk a lot with the risk and compliance people around their enterprise software. So choosing so let's just take a look at what's happened here through history, right?

We've been using these ERP systems for 15 to 20 years, right, we've continued to add to them and add to them and add to them customize and customize and configure them. Intellectual property all built into these these are the backbone operations of our of our businesses, right?

They are 100% mandatory 100% mission critical and they cannot be less than 100% available for a man. Right? The problem is that chief risk officers are noting that there is a significant risk with the unavailability of these systems.

If these systems are not 100% available, even for a minute or a day or a week, serious financial implications can happen and in some even industries, even lives are on the line on some of these ERP systems that are that are running these these back office systems, and they cannot simply rely on the vendors to provide them an adequate level of support.

And as we've matured the use of our ERPs, these vendors have not matured along with us to provide a reasonable adequate appropriate level of support for the systems, we can't just open up a ticket and wait for them to get back to us or having to throw us a bunch of documentation or tell us to go sell support, or just default to go apply some patches and call us back.

If it happens more, you just we just cannot have that level of support. So this is keeping chief risk officers up at night, that the risk is just too great to not have the adequate level of service.

And this is what the heart of our support organization remains three handles with a 71 second response time from permission critical systems, we log directly into our system, our customer systems and fix their problems.

We don't just throw documentation at people, we have people up back and running in world class time, and we're the market leader in this space to be able to do that.

And hey, if we can save a few bucks along the way and not spend, you know, we can spend 50 to 90% less than we do with with the vendors and have that adequate level of support.

It's a win win for the business and the chief risk officer can kind of cross that off the list because now they're now they're in a more adequate better hands with our minister.

Okay, how have remained is speaking of saving a few bucks and business models and all that how has remained these business model changed or adapted. During your time as this in this external CTO role? What were your marching orders coming into the roll?

It sounds the company's been growing your 430 million in revenues. So it's a good size for a mid sized support company? What were your marching orders? What is it your CEO wants you to do out there in the market? Right.

So you know, when we started in 2005, we just started with PeopleSoft. And, and now we've grown to hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of enterprise applications that we support today, and have grown that company.

And that's tradition that we have organically grown is by continues, continue adding multiple global geographies and multiple products into our support portfolio.

When I joined my marching orders was to start looking at what our customers are asking us to provide we were we were getting a lot of requirements from our customers say, hey, you know, you're doing really great on support.

But now could you just do the fully managed service? Can you just take it off of my hands altogether and just do the day to day.

So I don't have one managed services provider over here and I don't use Rimini street over here for the for the vendor replacement support, can you just take the whole thing all together and get it off, off I play.

So our customers have been asking us to start moving into additional products and services that are kind of around that that core core support.

So now we have full managed services capabilities to do complete the day to day, we also added our customers asked us to do consulting and professional services so that if they want to do some additional modules or want to do some additional implementations, we have a full team of folks there that can just go in there and do the do the additional work.

And of course, what's great about having us do it is that we support whatever we we created, right? So it's all kind of part is part of that. We also do same your you eat what you cook, literally.

So yeah, we can't implement garbage stuff, because then we're on the hook for supporting it right.

But of course also things like cybersecurity, we were full specialists in cybersecurity securing the enterprise, all ERP platforms from kind of the web layer, the middleware layer, database layer is all kind of protected in there.

And we also have a full suite of we call interoperability and compatibility solutions.

So if people need to get an ERP compatible with something new, even if it's an older ERP, we make sure that we can get all of that stuff working without having to burden our customers with doing a full upgrade or a reimplementation just to get that compatibility working.

So there and the capability to do that. These are some of the core questions or maybe the graduate level questions that CIOs should be asking when they are interviewing potential support providers. Give us some of your thoughts on on that.

I mean, you do have competitors out in the market, of course, but when you're looking at it as a CIO, what are some of the gotcha areas that they should be cautiously exploring and getting lots of documentation on that kind of thing? Sure.

So I mean, we definitely want to look at SLAs and the history of those facilities. You know, another thing that's really interesting that, that people find very important, is tax and legal and regulatory updates.

That is a very big thing in the world of ERP and Those things cannot be wrong, right, or you get fined if you have the things right on from, you know, federal state.

And so we want to make sure that our customers are given the right adequate level of tax and legal regulatory updates that are, that are needed for their system in a timely manner.

So we have over 300 engineers just in our tax and legal and regulatory division, that specialized in all those regulatory updates all over the world, that more people just in that department than our nearest competitor has in their entire company. Right.

So you're gonna have to really see that defense in depth of people so that you can ensure that if, you know if there's we're you're protected from nutrition or an engineer leaving or, or things of that sort we we also pride ourselves in if you can see this in our reports of having a good cash reserves.

So we're able to really the weather, any kind of storm that might come up through, you know, economic pressures or, or talent shortage, presage pressures, we're able to kind of weather that storm. So we're around, we're transparent. It's all in that in that in those public filings.

And that really is a key differentiator from some of the much our nearest competitors is very small, right, and it just won't have those kinds of levels of cash reserves to, to weather those storms.

So we want to make sure that you're looking at the longevity of the company and making sure that you're not separating out the needed services like like, oh, go to tax and legal regulatory with that company, but do your support with this company, they all have to be put together, it's too it's too important.

So a lot of things, not when you're when you're looking at just true size, longevity depth of of it, we have patented solutions, that there's going to be only unique to us that that the other folks don't have as well. So it's very important.

Okay, let's pivot over to talking about the roadmap, technology vendors for decades have had, you know, their customer advisory groups, people will join them just so that they can get in on some of the thinking on where's it all going?

Where's your ERP project product going in the future? How is the process of roadmapping? How have you seen it changing? What kind of a role Have you played in that?

And how do you turn a vendor product driven roadmap into more of a business and technology needs driven roadmap, let's talk through that a little bit.

So that's, that's interesting, because when you talk about a vendor driven roadmap, what happens is, is that you're going to upgrade or migrate to the latest version, and you're going to get any net new innovation that the vendor deems that you you're going to get and you get what you get, you didn't ask for any of it, you just got what you got in in the in the new version, maybe that applies to you, maybe you use it, maybe you won't, right.

So roadmapping today flips that model on its head, or at least our roadmap, it slips that out on the honest model.

And what we do is we look at how you're using the ERP today, by module by function by feature and what your business needs interruptions are to approve that process or or replace it, if it's just, it's easier to do it that way.

Or look at a different vendor altogether for that particular model and do a software selection somewhere else, again, that kind of extend and composable type type of strategy, so that you're actually getting the business enablement that is needed.

You know, a lot of people are kind of on an AI journey, they're kind of underreporting journey, they want to, they want to, they want to go from historical reporting to more predictive analytics and more decision support systems and things like that. That's the journey that they're on.

And you know, these these kinds of vendor driven roadmaps are not getting them there, or they're certainly not getting them there in a cost effective way or in a quick enough way. So those sort of roadmap things, man becomes a scientific exercise.

And that's what I stressed most about this, we take, you have to take the emotion out of it, there's a lot of people that are very emotional about the vendor of choice that they've had a relationship with for so long.

But at the end of the day, we've got a business to run.

And if we have to have if we're having problems with, with our report, a friend problems with HR for having problems with not getting quicker to better, you know, analytics or whatever those business requirements are, we have to look at what that business requirement is and look at all options available to us to get that business objective reached.

Not just want all options. Now, once you have all the options laid out the possible end states, then it becomes a financial model.

At that point, you start taking a look at the five options that you have to solve their business problems, look at the cost associated with each one of them, and the ROI associated with each one of those. And my main driver for ROI is year payback.

So if you asked in option A and the year payback is you know In the next year or two, okay, maybe that makes sense. But if you invest in that when the year payback is your 30, then maybe that isn't a really great investment.

And we should look at the different options to see if we can get a better ratio as cost to, to ROI. So again, I'm motionless, scientifically, mathematically, financially all put together. And the problem is, is that it's not fun. And it's a lot of work.

It's more roadmapping that probably many CIOs and CTOs have ever had to do before in their life, because, again, we just stores the vendor path for so many years. And that's just not acceptable anymore.

With the amount of products and solutions that we have available to us today, then they all have to be considered and taken, taken into consideration with ROI analysis that can be justified. Yeah.

Tell us about like an example of when you work with a company doing this roadmapping exercise size of company, how long it took, who was in the room? Was it always the CIO? Did the chief risk officer drop in kind of paint that picture for us? Sure.

So we had the customer that went through this, and they were on a path, at least they thought they were going to be on a path to do the cloud re implementation and take it up on their, on their, on their, on their cloud technology program.

And they brought us in to say, what are our other options to be able to do this. And there were some great things in this particular case in the cloud model that would help them solve a couple of business problems. But not all of that, right.

So what we had to do is start from the very beginning, outline all of their pain points, but also their aspirations of where they want to be in a company for the next five years. What, what they need to improve.

And then we go and do a full analysis of each of those modules.

And this is the tough part because you have to talk to a lot of people, right, I got to talk to everybody in finance, I got to see what they're doing, how they're using the system, I got to talk to everybody in HR, I got to see if how they use this system, what they're doing.

So there's a lot of interviews, there's a lot of process that has to happen. There's a traffic lighting system, that it's red, here, it's green, here, it's yellow here, I'll get very, very scientific, to be able to understand what those options are.

And then we started looking at mapping the new cloud model from the vendors, and how it mapped to every one of those which we call opportunities. And all the opportunities are numbered opportunity, one opportunity to opportunities are measured with a cost and associated year payback and ROI.

And that's a spreadsheet that's hundreds and hundreds of hundreds allied lines long, that kind of do this kind of scientific analysis.

So we map moving to the cloud and how that's going to hit those those those objectives, versus more of a composable model to where you would not put into time, money and resources for that upgrade. And instead, use what you have today.

But then solve the individual business problems by either adding to or customizing what you already have today, or maybe expanding with another solution, a lightweight solution on top of it, that's gonna get you that business outcomes at a fraction of the cost of doing a full rip and replace of the entire system, and then remodel it out over I think it was seven or eight years and showed a massive difference.

I think the cloud one was a something like a $30 million investment, and it had an ROI of about 200%. But the composable strategy, had a $5 million think investment and an ROI of 680%. Okay, on that investment.

So when you model it down like that, that way, you know, you're not putting the emotion into it, you're not coming in with any preconceived notions, we were telling this customer not to go to cloud, we were just saying, hey, let's do that. Now.

You asked how long it took, it took about six months, because you can't, okay. The reason why is because we have to talk to so many people and use everybody's time. So we try not to bother anybody for more than maybe two or three hours a week.

So it kind of stretches up the project. But it's all really dependent on how much time customers can spend with us to be able to do that. But the results are board level ready results.

We've gotten board of directors, we've looked at all of our options, and here's the numbers and the numbers don't lie. And here's the model, the models don't lie.

And that's how you can justify a roadmap so you can justify future plans how you can justify investments right now is is roadmapping something new that Rimini Street is doing, say from five and 10 years ago, it sounds like it's a kind of a growing part of your own revenues.

Yeah, it is. And the reason why is because of these cloud pressures, right?

So once once these vendors came up and started telling everybody, you know that they've got to get off of there, they're in there on Prime It's environments and reimplement everything to the cloud that made her phone rang, right? They said what I have here?

And how can I justify to a very skeptical board of directors or our IT leaders who, you know, are all, you know, pals with it with the vendors?

How can I justify to these folks that there are different ways to do this and be able to put, you know, the money and where the mouth is? And say, Yes, this is this is what that modeling.

So yeah, it's been about two or three years now that we've really perfected this, we have a lot of intellectual property. In this, we have complete financial models for almost every module that you have in ERP.

So one directly for manufacturing, one for HR, one, for finance, and so on, was through it very, very in depth, so fairly new a few years.

Now, a lot of these customers you deal with are probably also already involved with various Big Data Management Systems vendors that just thinking like the Andersens and the Price Waterhouse Coopers in the world, do you end up working in concert with those, or is this usually just a Rimini Street play?

Sometimes, but the difference between what we do and those large s eyes is those large s eyes are all partners with the major vendors.

So if you're going to get an independent assessment, from a large Si, you're going to get the same exact assessment that you're going to get if you had one of the vendors do it as well, because they're all part of a collective team that is designed to get their customers to change as much as possible.

You know, the bigger the change, the bigger the project, the more people get paid along the way, the consulting firms, the advisory firms, the software firms, the hardware firms, they're all in it together in this collective.

So if you get this independent review, I can tell you what it's gonna say, before we even get started, right? You've got to rip everything all out and start all over and go and go to a club. Because fall in this kind of consortium together.

Whereas Rimini Street, we don't care, because we've got products and services on each end state that you go to, it really doesn't matter, matter to us.

And we're going to help you in in a completely agnostic scientific way, show you all the options that you have partners with anybody that's going to sway our decisions or make suggest one thing over another. Right?

Well, you and you mentioned Gartner and they're inventing, you know, another term, the composable module approach. I've uh, I've always traditionally and this may be a journalism and media sort of thing.

I've always felt that all the all the analysts and the analysis firms are pretty deeply indebted to all these big software players, because they're the ones who pay a lot of their expenses and so forth.

I mean, they buy their reports and all that, but you are quoting a gardener model on composability. And that sort of thing.

So how do you manage to keep you know, the the people, all those different parts of the industry with a vested interest in selling more software or selling to the big customers? How do you keep them from influencing what you're going to recommend?

Well, you well, you can't, you just have to be the source of truth to the source of, of reason.

And I think people just as you're doing all the basic research of trying to figure out which which company to work with, you also have to understand which analysts to work with as well.

And I speak to a lot of Gartner analysts, and not all of them say the same thing. They're not all on the same page, right? Because they all kind of different, different associations, right.

So if you talk to a procurement analyst that is designed to give advice to their, to their customers in ways that they can cut costs, and have immediate effects on that many times they are recommending Remini Street, because we can instantly bring back 50 to 90% off of those of those budgets, instant realization.

So when we are seeing that, but if you also have ones that you know, are really embedded with with these cloud technologies, or with these, these software vendors, then you might also get some, some some advice to to do those things as well.

So the best thing that you can do is gather all the data points that you possibly can, and try to make the right decision for yourself. But at the end of the day, the right decision is going to be done. When you do the ROI analysis.

It's all everything stops with the ROI analysis.

If you can't, if you can't justify a project to re implement everything and move to the cloud, and you can't articulate what business positive business impact you're going to have to the company by doing that, and what year payback is that going to be?

Then at the end of the day, that's going to be a driving factor on decision system. So get everyone's opinion, but do the math. Do the math.

Actually, a couple of CIOs have said that to me when we get talking about AI and looking at you know, especially Gen AI and all the hoopla around it right now, and a few of them have said to me, you know, it's really just math.

You know, at the end of the day predictive analytics earlier this year, you wrote a blog pa post on the Rimini site.

And it was about AI as potential meeting ROI pragmatism, which is a lot of what we've been talking about, and the crucial questions that every 娇色导航should ask the first one, how will we use it to meet our business? Objectives? How will we make sure it's used responsibly?

And how will we make sure our employees can be successful with it? How much are you running into those kinds of conversations these days?

And as we wrap up in our last few minutes, what is some advice you have from your chair as you're looking at all this in the industry? Because there's never been hoopla around anything like there has been around Gen AI? Yeah, you're absolutely right.

And some people are playing with it. Some people are not a lot of responsibility, questions on it, and ethics and privacy as well, that comes up.

So I think we're starting to see companies form departments around a set of creating centers of excellence around this particular topics and make sure that they're there, they're done in a way that's actually going to meet a business requirement.

Again, you know, I know I'm at nauseam about it, but you really need to start with business requirements and not play with something just for the sake of playing for with it.

And I think a lot of the points that I make with with ERP is I think, is that vendors are trying to lure customers to abandon their on premise models and move to the and re implement everything into the cloud with the promise of incremental AI functionality that will only be available in the cloud and not be back ported to the on premise models.

But if you really peel back the onion on the things that are available in that cloud, these are things that the vendor gives to their customers, they didn't ask for it, right. So they don't know if it's even going to fit their needs or not.

And it's just way too long to get there. If it's gonna take me five years to reimplement, then I'm already five years behind, with with with whatever incremental functionality that's, that's going to be there.

And if you really look at what's there, that technology has already existed for years anyways. So we'll get again, we want to, we want to change the attitude of relying on one single monolithic provider.

So if you want to look at an HR system, and a finance system and a transactional system, look no farther than these ERP vendors, that's fantastic. But if you want cybersecurity go to cybersecurity company, if you want AI capabilities go to an AI free but a company, right?

So you're finding the best business outcomes with the right skill sets at the right time at the right money. So that would be my my main thing.

And when it comes to ERP and AI, if you come to the conclusion that I've come to, and that is the value of the ERP, in the trajectory of AI, is the data in which it contains, that's all value. Yes.

So if you come to that conclusion, then the version of that ERP is irrelevant. And you already have everything that you need, from with the ERP today, you don't need to upgrade to upgrade, you still have the same data.

So if the value is the data, then what you need to get started tomorrow. And you need to do any kind of ERP upgrade to start taking advantage of some of these emerging technologies. Yeah, you can think of the data as the company jewels.

And essentially, the ERP is the display counters the displayed cabinets for all of your data. We think it's a point in time, it's a goldmine, right, you have 20 years of supplier data and foiled finance data marketing data, you can't buy that data, right?

It's data unique to that particular company.

So which what better data to use for the robots, right then to take these kinds of unique data that's in your, your company in your industry, and be able to go mine that for the insights that can really give you that competitive advantage?

And it just makes a lot of sense. It just doesn't belong in the ERP. It includes ERP data, along with other things really should be done outside that ERP with specialized vendors. Yes. Okay. All good points. And thank you very much for joining me for this session today.

I think I told you, our hour would fly by did you find that to be true? All right, good. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure having you here and hearing all this industry. Insider advice, a lot of it quite good.

If you joined us late today, you can watch the full episode later here today on LinkedIn, but also on cio.com in our library of leadership, live shows and on our YouTube channel, cio leadership live is also available as an audio podcast wherever you find your podcasts.

And I hope you enjoyed today's conversation and all of the insights from Rimini street CTO, Eric Helmer.

We'll be back again next week on Wednesday, June 5th, with Jeff Sippel who is the 娇色导航of Northwestern Mutual Insurance, and if you want to make sure you don't miss any of our shows, take a moment and subscribe to CIOs YouTube channel, you'll find more than 125 previous episodes of the leadership live show, as well as several international editions that have spun out of our podcast featuring CIOs from Canada, India, New Zealand, and Australia.

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