Over the course of my career, I’ve spent more than 30 years working with Oracle ERP systems, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Database and related technologies. And half of those years have been right here at Rimini Street, helping clients maintain and optimize their Oracle EBS environments.
Before I joined the company in 2011, I was on the other side of the table, dealing with the same challenges our clients face daily. I recall spending hours hunting vendor knowledge bases for answers, applying patches that sometimes broke something else and logging support tickets that slowly crawled through tier after tier before finally reaching someone who understood the product. I lived that frustration from the inside. It’s why I joined Rimini Street 15 years ago, and why I love what we do: the outcomes we deliver to our clients and the relief they feel knowing they have the best experts on their side.
The Rimini Street advantage: Expertise
When I joined Rimini Street, the biggest difference I noted was that the caliber of the people around me was unlike anything I had seen in vendor support. Every engineer hired brought at least 10 years of hands-on Oracle experience. Not a help desk. No deflection. No, “Have you checked the knowledge base?” Just deep, direct expertise.
When you open a ticket with us, you get a Primary Support Engineer who has been in your shoes before and understands your Oracle EBS environment with great detail. The benefit of this is that clients get faster, complete fixes, not just a temporary workaround.
One of my first cases was a perfect example of that. I jumped on a bridge call for a critical P1 issue. On the client side, there were about ten people from their IT team, including Microsoft specialists and DBAs. On our side, it was just one other engineer and me. The client’s IT manager looked around and asked, “Are more engineers joining?” We said, “No, let’s get to the issue and see how we can help.”
They’d been working on this problem for at least half a day. They’d looked at everything and tried multiple approaches before filing a ticket with us. We jumped into reviewing logs and looking at trace files and talking through the symptoms. Within 30 minutes, we identified the root cause and recommended a fix. They tested the change on a non-production instance right there in the session, and it resolved the issue.
Afterward, the IT manager sent a really thoughtful email to our executives thanking us for how quickly and completely we solved it. We proved that it’s not the number of people you throw at a problem that matters. It’s the expertise you bring to the table. Our two engineers with deep experience outperformed a room full of people. And that’s what we deliver: expertise, speed and results.
That was early in my time here. Fifteen years later, I manage Oracle Applications and Technology delivery across all of North America, leading a team of more than 40 engineers who operate the same way. Our engineers don’t just close tickets. They solve problems in a way that builds trust. Over time, that trust turns a support provider into a long-term business partner.
Staying focused on business challenges, not vendor deadlines
During my time at Rimini Street, I have worked through countless complex client situations. Many of them involved tuning customizations and complications tied to upgrades and patching. And the more I see, the more convinced I become that the biggest threat to ERP stability is not the systems themselves. It is the constant vendor pressure to change them unnecessarily.
Here is what I see play out repeatedly: a client has a specific business challenge with their Oracle E-Business Suite system, and the vendor’s answer is almost always the same: upgrade. Move to the cloud. Migrate to Oracle Fusion. But better data management and improved process efficiencies don’t come from out-of-the-box software releases. They come from people who understand the business problem and know how to solve it within the system you already have.
When clients ask me about upgrading to gain new functionality, I always ask the same question: what is the actual problem you are trying to solve? If your month-end close is failing because of a costing issue in a custom subledger, you don’t need a new ERP. You need an engineer who has seen that exact problem before and can trace it to the root cause in an hour. We bring deep application-specific expertise and business acumen to evaluate all solutions to an issue, whether it’s customizations, a business process change or something else; we help clients solve it.
I have worked with Fortune 500 retailers, global manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. These are organizations where a four-hour ERP outage does not just mean lost productivity. It means missed shipments, regulatory exposure and real revenue impact. For those clients, the answer is never “just upgrade.” The answer is always “let’s understand the problem first.”
In the video below, I go deeper into why upgrades don’t equal innovation and how Rimini Street is helping clients achieve real business outcomes without disruptive upgrades or rip-and-replace projects.
Don’t trade your customizations for upgrades
I’ve spoken with clients who took the upgrade track and moved parts of their ERP environment to Oracle Fusion. Many of them regretted it. Oracle Fusion doesn’t support customizations the way Oracle E-Business Suite does. And that matters more than most people realize.
The licensing complexity alone is staggering. Many felt like they were paying far more than the value they received. And the biggest limitation? Customizations. Oracle Fusion strongly encourages “configuration over customization,” and while some extensibility options exist through tools like Oracle Visual Builder, they are far more constrained than what organizations are used to with Oracle E-Business Suite. For businesses with deeply embedded custom logic, the gap between what Oracle Fusion allows and what they need can be significant. If your business doesn’t fit within those boundaries, you are left trying to reshape your operations around the software instead of the other way around.
For any enterprise running complex operations that process millions of transactions a day, there is no such thing as an off-the-shelf ERP that works without modification. Customizations aren’t technical debt. They’re competitive differentiation. They’re how your supply chain runs differently than your competitors’. They’re why your business works the way it does. Telling a company to abandon those customizations and conform to a standard product is like telling them to give up what makes them good at what they do.
I still think back to one of my first client visits after joining Rimini Street. I walked into a conference room in Dallas expecting to meet a small team and found 30 people at the table, representing IT, operations and management. The first thing they told me was why they’d switched to us: we support customizations.
They had built roughly a million lines of custom code into their Oracle environment, effectively rebuilding the platform to meet their specific business needs. Their previous support model wouldn’t touch it. We fully supported it. Over time, we freed up their internal engineering team from firefighting and enabled them to start working on projects that actually moved the business forward.
Innovation doesn’t require a new system
Pushing your entire ERP environment through a disruptive upgrade just to solve one specific business problem is overengineering, and it almost always creates new problems that did not exist before. The smarter path is to build on top of what you already have. Today, that means AI. I’m seeing this firsthand in my own work at Rimini Street. We are exploring how AI can analyze years of support case data to predict which issues are likely to escalate before they become emergencies. That’s the kind of innovation that doesn’t require a new ERP. It layers intelligence on top of what already works. With modern APIs and AI capabilities connected to existing Oracle E-Business Suite systems, Rimini Street is helping clients get functionality they were told required expensive new module licenses, lengthy configuration and full implementation cycles. And we are doing it on their existing systems, at a fraction of the time and cost.
Rimini Street also takes the pressure off organizations to meet vendor-dictated timelines just to maintain support. We guarantee support for a client’s Oracle environment for up to 15+ more years from the contract date, regardless of the release or version they are running, whether that is Oracle EBS 12.2, 12.1 or earlier. That timeline gives our clients the freedom to make thoughtful, business-driven decisions rather than reactive ones driven by vendor pressure. You get to evaluate your options, build your roadmap on your own terms and use AI and innovation to close capability gaps without blowing up a system that is running your business just fine. I sat down for a short interview to discuss these issues and more. Watch the full video now.
If you’re looking for a better way to support, optimize and innovate with your existing Oracle systems, learn more about our portfolio of support and services for Oracle.
To learn more about how we’ve helped Oracle clients, browse our library of Oracle client success stories.
