Over the years, Rimini Street has continuously expanded its ability to support and run SAP applications such as Business Suite, Business Objects, Sybase, HANA DB, and S/4HANA. Working with Rimini Street, organizations can reduce their SAP support budget, increase the value of that maintenance, and improve support quality.
At Rimini Street, Global Vice President and General Manager for SAP Services Jennifer Perry is responsible for all Rimini Street services for SAP worldwide.
Jennifer sat down with Rimini Street Senior Product Marketing Director Scott Hays to discuss what makes Rimini Street support for SAP different and her unique insights
Scott Hays: What major challenges are SAP leaders facing today?
Jennifer Perry: The SAP ERP roadmap.
SAP seems to be forcing licensees to migrate to S/4HANA. Many of these businesses have mature systems that are highly customized and integrated with many other systems. The challenge is figuring out how to reduce process and technical debt and determine if, or when, to migrate to S/4HANA. Short term, leaders are likely focused on accelerating roll outs of more short-term, high-impact business initiatives around SAP innovation and digital transformation.
SH: As a former client of Rimini Street, what made you evaluate third-party support and choose Rimini Street?
JP: Reducing IT spend.
Like many enterprises, my former organization needed to optimize SAP spend to free up funds and IT resources in order to invest in customer experience improvements.
SH: And in that role, what did you experience as the biggest benefit of third-party support?
JP: Quality of resources.
Rimini Street resolved the root cause of issues that the software vendor simply wasn’t able to fix. For example, we had a manual workaround for a payroll issue for two years. Rimini Street was able to identify and fix it in less than two weeks!
SH: How is Rimini Street support for SAP different from SAP support?
JP: Rimini Street is more responsive and effective.
The primary differentiators were the Rimini Street personalized support model that delivered ultra-responsive service and effective resolutions, plus the ability to support my company globally. Additionally, Rimini Street built tax, legal, and regulatory (TLR) updates customized to the countries that were applicable to the company right into our development environment. These services allowed me to lessen any dependence on my business and IT teams, freeing them to address higher-value projects.
SH: What major innovations has Rimini Street implemented to help clients optimize their SAP roadmap?
JP: AI-driven support, Agile development, and application management services.
By integrating artificial intelligence into the support process, Rimini Street has been able to streamline case management and deliver industry-leading response times with SLAs for critical (P1) incidents down to 10 minutes and P2 response down to 15 minutes. Implementing the Agile framework has helped us further streamline development to get improvements to clients faster. For clients seeking a unified support model, we’ve also expanded our services to include application management services.
SH: If there is one thing you would pick in Rimini Street support that you are most proud of, what would it be?
JP: Client satisfaction.
I’m most proud of the high-level of client satisfaction for the SAP product line driven by our amazing Global Engineering Team and support engineers. Recent results show Rimini Street clients are experiencing a 4.9/5 average satisfaction rate — unheard of in the IT services industry.
SH: And finally, what is your priority for Rimini Street support for SAP for this year?
JP: Spreading the word to SAP licensees.
Ensuring that all SAP licensees know they have solid alternatives to their software vendor with the Rimini Street support ecosystem. I would personally like to build more thought leadership around business and IT roadmaps.
Learn more about Rimini Street third-party support for SAP ERP.
