02.13.19 by Dave Jackson
How Welch’s Squeezed More Value From IT With Rimini Street
Because my ultimate bosses are family farmers, I do not get a lot of credit for spending money on technology for technology's sake. Farming is a tough business, and they are right to have high expectations of the technology investments we make. ...
01.25.19 by Frank Reneke
Unpacking Your Update Manager Box for PeopleSoft: “Is it just me or are they empty inside?”
Software updates can be a lot like getting a gift you didn't ask for, and while you may pay a great deal for software updates, they can often contain no clear value. ...
01.07.19 by Tim DeLisle
What Retailers Have In Common on IT Spending and Digital Innovation
The holiday season gave retailers an unexpected gift: sales rose 5.1 percent between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24, a six-year high 1 . To put that into perspective, the National Retail Federation put the average annual increase at about 3.9% over the previous five years. ...
12.21.18 by Frank Reneke
Making Sense of SaaS: Critical Questions to Ask Before Signing Cloud Software Contracts
The term "Software-as-a-Service" (SaaS) has turned into a marketing catch-phrase. Many software vendors are using it to boost the appeal of their applications because SaaS implies lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and other benefits like much faster deployment. But, before you take the plunge, it pays to arm yourself with the facts so you can separate true SaaS from the hype and make sense of vendor claims ...
12.10.18 by Dan Ashton
Why Layered Security is the Best for Enterprises
Banks learned long ago not to rely on one lock, one gate or one guard for protection. In the same way, IT security is never about one tool, one protocol or one software patch. Protecting modern IT infrastructures means blocking attack vectors at each layer of the stack (system; software; and network), as well as defending against potential threats and detecting suspicious activity. ...
12.07.18 by David Rowe
How to Join the Digital Vanguard
Is your organization a digital laggard or a member of the digital vanguard? ...
12.03.18 by Desmond Whitt
Updating And Securing Java Under Oracle’s Latest Rules
Clients who rely on Rimini Street for support of Oracle enterprise software have been asking us how we can help support their Java applications after the end of January 2019. That is the date after which Oracle says it will stop providing updates to publicly available versions of Java SE 8 to users without a commercial subscription. ...
11.15.18 by Jason Kotsaftis
Oracle’s Cloud Programs: Beware a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
The promise of the cloud is to liberate IT from the cost and burden of tiresome daily IT administration, while delivering more freedom to select from the industry's latest and best innovations ...
10.30.18 by Kyra Ecker
With ERP Support from Rimini Street, Multnomah County Gains Flexibility While Making Best Use of Taxpayer Dollars
At just 465 miles square, Multnomah County in Oregon is home to 800,000 residents. With the county seat in Portland, the organization employs 8,000 people and has an annual operating budget of $2 billion USD, funded by taxpayers. Multnomah County is responsible for its operating units and for securely maintaining its systems to fulfill certain requirements, such as records retention. The organization believes in getting the most from its IT spend. The county's next-generation IT strategy included this must-have: responsive service with support and maintenance at an optimized co ...
10.22.18 by Kyra Ecker
ESCO Rides the Wave of Economic Change with Help from Rimini Street
In today's dynamic global economy, organizations in nearly all sectors are subject to shifts in the marketplace, experiencing periods of high growth as well as slumps. If your organization is like most, when a downturn occurs, you may start to think about trimming operational expenditures. Often, one of the largest budget line items, aside from personnel, is Oracle licensing, support and maintenance fees ...
10.02.18 by Pat Phelan
Do You Know Where Your ERP Roadmap Is Taking You?
Make ERP roadmap decisions based on business goals like business transformation, modernization, or cost cutting, not on vendor ultimatums or ease of acquiring and installing cloud technologies ...
09.14.18 by David Rowe
Strategies for Supporting SAP S/4HANA From “Wait And See” To “Full Speed Ahead”
Clients of Rimini Street's support for SAP have the freedom to make independent decisions about S/4HANA - but that doesn't necessarily mean they reject SAP's reinvention of its ERP software ...
09.07.18 by Andrew O'Driscoll
Seeking The Next Salesforce Services Revolution at Dreamforce 2018
When I attended my first Dreamforce in 2005, I already knew I wanted to build a systems integration business around Salesforce. Once everyone saw the potential, I was sure Salesforce implementations would skyrocket and companies would be looking for help with progressively more ambitious plans for the cloud software ...
09.04.18 by Desmond Whitt
How To Fix Desktop Java Version Glitches With Enterprise Applications
ERP systems and other enterprise applications sometimes break when the software was written to work with a specific release of Java that is not the one user desktops are configured to use by default. What are you supposed to do when that happens? Make users revert to a version of Java that may be obsolete or include known security vulnerabilities. Or upgrade to a new version of the application, solely to resolve that issue ...
08.20.18 by Pete Bartolik
Five Steps for Bringing About Change in IT
IT leaders are upbeat for the most as they continue to move ahead with digital transformation efforts. It's not that the budget spigots are opening wide - for most, spending and hiring rates are flat. "One of the biggest reasons for the hopeful outlook is the fact that business and IT are finally on the same page, with planned technology projects and overall strategic business goals closely aligned for the upcoming year," according to Julia King's analysis of Computerworld's Tech Forecast , which surveyed 196 IT leaders. The survey offers an opportunity to assess how you stand compared to your peer ...
08.13.18 by Pete Bartolik
Taking Control of Your Software Licenses in the Cloud Era
Software licensing is like a devil's pact. Enterprises fund and commit to continue funding software development costs in exchange for the promise of ongoing support and, hopefully, functionally rich upgrades. Over time, however, CIOs often end up cursing the growing costs of supporting mature-but-critical applications and having to pay for forced upgrades they don't always want. Open source and cloud computing have fundamentally impacted licensing models, but there's still the need to support critical software that isn't going away anytime soon ...
07.24.18 by Ellis Booker
5 Reasons to Kill (or Rethink) a Pilot Project
Once they get a foot in the door, enterprise software vendors will predictably start pushing pilots of their latest and greatest wares, from hybrid cloud to in-memory databases. For customers, testing these extensions and enhancements can make sense, provided there's a strong business case, supportive leadership, and the right success metrics. Innovative organizations are always looking for technologies that promise to streamline business processes or create new business opportunities ...
07.17.18 by Jeremy Sayler
4 Best Practices to Reduce the Pain of an Oracle License Audit
The words "license audit" are guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any Oracle customer today. At best, going through the audit process is a hassle. At worst, it can result in an unexpected hit to the IT budget — even if you've been trying in good faith to play by the vendor's rules. Across the globe, CIOs are working to optimize IT budgets and reduce the burden of costly annual vendor maintenance fees. They want to focus on driving innovation and grow ...
07.10.18 by Desmond Whitt
How to Fix ERP Browser Compatibility Issues
Solving web browser compatibility issues can be a surprisingly big issue for any IT organization trying to maximize the useful life of its ERP and other enterprise systems that came of age early in the web era. Wasn't browser-based computing supposed to make everything easier? If your current ERP system meets your needs, we don't think browser compatibility ought to be thing that drives you to undertake a costly and disruptive upgrade ...
06.18.18 by David Rowe
Biggest Obstacle to Innovation, IT Leaders Say: "Keeping the Lights On"
Businesses want to innovate faster because they know successful innovators tend to be the most successful businesses. Yet if you survey IT and finance leaders, as we did recently in conjunction with Vanson Bourne, a technology market research firm, you will find many are dissatisfied with the pace of innovation happening in their organizations. The tremendous potential of digital business is very much on their minds, but they see too much of their actual IT spending ...
06.11.18 by Pete Bartolik
Maximize Your Opportunity within the Cloud
One of the most appealing aspects of cloud computing is the promise — in theory at least — that if you're not happy with a vendor, you can migrate to another with much less pain than with traditional enterprise solution providers. Today, CIOs have an almost bewildering choice of cloud applications and cloud platforms. This multi-cloud reality opens up greater potential for leveraging on-premises enterprise software with cloud resources ...
06.04.18 by Pete Bartolik
Digital Transformation: Funding the Ongoing Journey
If a technology solutions salesperson walks out of your office without playing the "digital transformation" card, he or she is not likely long for that job. Vendors, whether through strategic vision or competitive necessity, have latched onto the aspirations and concerns of business customers who fear digital disruption. "Digital transformation rocketed to the top of mind for brands, enterprises, and organizations in 2016," writes R. "Ray" Wang , founder of Constellation Research and author of Disrupting Digital Business . "The fear of being disrupted by non-traditional competitors, ...
05.21.18 by Hari Candadai
Debunking the Top 4 Myths of SAP Software Support
Enterprise software support is a multi-billion dollar source of revenue for SAP and other ERP software vendors with operating margins as high as 95 percent for some companies. Software vendors have been known to aggressively protect this revenue stream and dissuade customers from exploring third-party support alternatives. As you evaluate if third-party support is right for you, it's important to separate enterprise software support myths from reality. ...
05.14.18 by David Rowe
Why a Stable, Available Business Platform is Key — Today and Tomorrow
As the role of IT evolves from keeping the lights on to helping shape business strategy, technology leaders are challenged to find room for those strategic projects in their schedules and in their budgets. In a recent poll by CIO , 72 percent of those surveyed admitted they are struggling to balance business innovation and operational excellence. How can you balance your traditional IT responsibilities with today's new transformational challenges ...
05.08.18 by Hari Candadai
Why Everyone Wants to “Help” with GDPR Compliance
With the May 25 deadline for compliance with the European Union's General Data Privacy Protection Regulation (GDPR) rapidly approaching, interest in the topic is at a fever pitch. The only bigger news will come when the first company gets slapped with a big fine for failing to adequately protect personal privacy under the law. Repeat violators could be fined as much as 4 percent of their annual turnover (net sales), a threat that has gotten everyone's attention. And it's not just EU companies that must worry: ...
04.30.18 by Jeremy Sayler
Don’t Allow SAP Indirect Access Fees to Block Innovation
Much of the digital business innovation taking place today involves reaching beyond the transactional systems at the core of a business to create new user experiences. Unfortunately, some SAP customers have discovered that creating a new user experience front end to an SAP back end can land them in hot water, if SAP decides that constitutes "indirect access" usage requiring additional licenses. In April, SAP introduced a new pricing model ...
04.23.18 by Sebastian Grady
What Do You Really Get For Your ERP Support Dollars?
I'll cut to the chase: Most companies running ERP software are overpaying for software support and are not receiving complete or sufficient coverage. How does this happen? Consider Oracle's ERP platform as a prime example. At this writing, the current version is 12.2.7. Yet according to a recent survey , nearly 40 percent of Oracle EBS licensees are in production on EBS 12.0 or earlier. The widely deployed EBS 11.5.10 release, for instance, hit general availability in 2004. Oracle pulled its premier support ...
04.16.18 by Andrew Powell
Why SAP Will Likely Extend ECC6 Maintenance Beyond 2025
We've seen it happen before and we will probably see it happen again. Within the next two years, it is increasingly likely that SAP will extend the maintenance window for ECC 6/Business Suite beyond 2025. In 2014, SAP announced that it extended maintenance on ECC 6/Business Suite by an additional five years through to 2025. Most observers believe this change came in response to SAP's customers demanding more time to absorb and assess SAP's change in product direction to HANA and S/4HANA. Fast forward to 2018: ...
04.09.18 by David Rowe
Video: SAP Expert Vinnie Mirchandani Sees No Rush to S/4HANA
SAP is in a hurry to get customers to move to its next generation S/4HANA platform. Yet most SAP customers are in no hurry to move — nor should they be, according to SAP watcher Vinnie Mirchandani. You can hear from Vinnie directly by watching the video clips embedded in this post (or watch them all as a single, seven-minute video ). What follows are my notes on what I found most interesting. Vinnie is the author of two books focused specifically on SAP, SAP Nation and SAP Nation 2.0 , and others on broader trends in technology ...
04.02.18 by Hari Candadai
How Innovative SAP Customers Tackle Performance and Interoperability Issues
Many SAP customers want to continue to run their core system of record for the foreseeable future. But performance and interoperability challenges are growing as technology environments change amidst rapid transitions to diverse hybrid IT environments. These rapid changes can have a significant performance impact on SAP systems including new software and servers, upgrades to the latest OS and browser versions, and changes in infrastructure that can trigger problems impacting the core ERP ...
03.26.18 by Sebastian Grady
How to Achieve a Healthy, Balanced Relationship with Your ERP Provider
Observing the enterprise software market today is like observing a major relationship crisis where one side is failing to listen to the other. It appears that suppliers are unrelentingly pushing their customers to move to the cloud. Their customers want to move to the cloud too, but not to rip and replace their perfectly functioning back-office systems of record. From the customer perspective, the cloud may be more suited to their data centers or infrastructure as a service ...
03.19.18 by Hari Candadai
Maximizing Value from Your SAP Business Suite Investments
Over a period of years, you've likely invested millions in an SAP platform that today is robust, stable and core to running your business. Like any good investment, your ECC 6.0 system and other Business Suite applications should yield strong dividends for years to come. In the context of IT, that means delivering the efficiency, availability and reliability required to meet business needs and drive growth. But is your payback in jeopardy? Two factors are prompting many SAP licensees to rethink their enterprise IT strategies for the near term and beyond ...
03.12.18 by Andrew Powell
Why Is Cloud Confusing? It’s Deliberate.
Major enterprise software vendors like Oracle and SAP are aggressively promoting "cloud" however chronic overuse of the term "cloud" may be creating common misconceptions. There are essentially two distinct cloud models, with very different characteristics, that are frequently confused because they are both generically called "cloud". The ongoing blurring of the term "cloud" can disadvantage enterprise software customers. Two main type of "cloud" are ...
02.26.18 by Paul Hope
Plan Ahead as the Cost of SAP and Oracle DBMS Runtime Skyrockets
As what was once a mutually beneficial partnership between SAP and Oracle grows increasingly contentious, customers may find themselves caught in the middle. One symptom: the price for getting an Oracle runtime database license bundled with SAP Business Suite is now more than double what it was three years ago. As a result, customers covered by this licensing who are trying to grow their businesses on a budget may feel the pinch. They should think about changing their relationship with the vendors, compensating for the price increase with other savings or both. What's gone wrong ...
02.20.18 by Pete Bartolik
Cut IT Support Costs to Drive Digital Business Initiatives
Does your IT organization eagerly embrace digital transformation, or quiver in fear at the prospect of it? If the former, you're following the model of world-class IT organizations that run more efficiently and devote a larger portion of their process costs to new business-focused initiatives. That's the takeaway from a study by Hackett Group , as reported in an issue of Computer Weekly . "IT is constrained by sunk investments and legacy technology and skillsets, while it must also embrace the digital world of cloud, big data analytics, social media, the internet of things (IoT), and mobility ...
02.15.18 by Hari Candadai
What You Need to Know to Exploit the Cloud
As digital transformation shakes up traditional business models, organizations of every size, in every industry, are exploring better ways to keep pace with change. Adoption of cloud computing technology has significantly increased over the last few years, promising a great opportunity for innovation amongst businesses if approached correctly, selectively and at the right pace. And the cloud model provides some compelling options to assist IT as its fiscal priorities move from cost management to cost optimization. According to IBM Cloud Managed Services Global Portfolio Manager Janice Dunstan ...
02.08.18 by Dean Alms
Six Battles That IT Needs to Be Armed for in 2018
IT managers face tough challenges even in the best of times. New technologies are always appearing, tried-and-true business models are evolving, and user expectations are soaring. As digital transformation picks up speed, it might seem like you're under nonstop, full-scale assault. To survive and thrive, you need to be ready for what's coming next. Here's a quick look at six of the top battles you'll be facing in 2018 ...
01.29.18 by Pete Bartolik
Don’t Trip on the Cloud Migration Path
It seems like everybody is rushing to migrate to cloud applications, and you don't want to get left on the wrong side of an inflection curve. But there are pitfalls for hasty cloud migration, so it's important to sit back and fully analyze what you've got and where you want to go. Early in 2016, the ERP world was shocked by reports of Gartner projecting a near-hundred percent failure rate of cloud ERP projects through 2018. The headlines may have been a little more dramatic than Gartner anticipated, but it certainly drove home the point that we're at an inflection point with ERP and ...
01.24.18 by Pete Bartolik
What’s the State of the CIO?
The life of a CIO? It's complicated. That's the conclusion of CIO Editor in Chief Dan Muse, introducing the publication's 2017 State of the CIO report. "Moving apps and workloads to the cloud, ensuring legacy software can talk to off-premises apps, and keeping networks and systems secure remain core functional tasks of the CIO role," Muse writes. "At the same time, boards of directors, CEOs, and business colleagues are turning to the CIO to lead digital transformations, win customers, and drive revenue." Transformers Rule the Day The report finds that more CIOs see themselves focused on ...
01.12.18 by Hari Candadai
Is There Hesitation to Commit to SAP S/4HANA?
Most SAP licensees plan to continue running their proven, SAP ERP releases given its rich functionality that more than meets their business needs without the cost, disruption and risk of migrating to S/4HANA. This was the top finding in a recent global survey conducted by Rimini Street, selected by 89 percent of the survey respondents. The findings are based on responses from CIOs, CTOs, IT VPs and directors and managers from a broad range of industries and company sizes across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Conducted in April 2017, the survey also revealed that custom ...
01.03.18 by Hari Candadai
Revealing the Risks at the S/4HANA Crossroads
As SAP continues to raise its bet for S/4HANA, SAP customers find themselves at a crossroads. Is it time to migrate to SAP's new application, or is a wait-and-see approach the best option? More than two years after SAP launched S/4HANA amid considerable fanfare, user adoption has been underwhelming. In the UK, just 5 percent of customers have deployed S/4HANA, a survey by the UK and Ireland SAP User Group found. Nearly half have no plans for S/4HANA. Similarly, 60 percent of members of the DSAG German-speaking SAP user group have no S/4HANA plans or are undecided ...
12.19.17 by David Rowe
Smart Strategies That Will Boost IT Cost Optimization
Digital transformation is picking up speed. It's driving businesses to rethink their traditional imperatives and bringing a new focus on customer engagement and disruptive business models. As companies emphasize new priorities, they need to optimize inefficient processes and reduce burdensome costs that are a drag on their business. For IT, that requires some tough choices. On the one hand, enterprises are looking to their IT departments to drive business growth and transformation. But at the same time, IT budgets are not keeping pace with growth and transformation initiatives ...
12.13.17 by Andrew Powell
The Evolving Role of the CIO in the Digital Age
For the longest time, the role of the chief information officer was set in stone. The job was all about keeping the technology "lights" on and, if possible, reducing costs. Today that job description is outdated. In the era of big data, apps and cloud computing, the role of today's CIO is to enable the business, innovate and focus on new technology strategies to help better engage customers and drive revenue. The reason the CIO's role has changed is because technology has changed. In the past, business tech was all about big implementations over a long period of time. The pace of ...
12.04.17 by Edenize Maron
Is There Really a Shortage of Funds for IT Business Innovation?
One of the main challenges in the IT market is the continued search for ways to innovate. IT is the cornerstone of many organizations' business strategy, and increasing investment in this area is crucial for companies that need to acquire new systems, maintain their current structure or enhance their competitiveness. Despite the recent poor performance of Brazil's economy, the country ended 2015 as one of the seven countries in the world with the highest technology spend, at nearly $60 billion USD. According to a joint study by the Brazilian Association of Software Companies (ABES) and ...
11.28.17 by Sebastian Grady
The Truth About Forced ERP Upgrades and How to Beat Them
Companies running ERP software are at a crossroads with their software strategy: "Should I follow the vendors' upgrade path or is it time to consider other options?" Vendors want ERP users to upgrade on the vendor schedules, but that's simply not the right fit for all (or most) customers. CIOs know they need to invest in digital transformation and analytics to improve the customer experience, run smarter and stay competitive. But they've been burned by the rush to stay current in the past, sometimes hastily implementing solutions that failed to deliver on their promises. Making matters worse ...
11.13.17 by David Rowe
What You Need to Know About Bimodal IT
The digital economy is all about fast innovation and getting new products to market more quickly than competitors. IT needs to step up its game to help drive innovation, without sacrificing top priorities such as compliance, cost control and maintaining availability. The stakes are high even for massive, successful businesses. Today, 50 percent of the Fortune 500 from the year 2000 no longer exist. Businesses understand the need for agility and innovation, with 64 percent stating that innovation and operational effectiveness are equally important for the success of their company. However, the ...
11.07.17 by Hari Candadai
Achieve the Best of Both Worlds with SAP and Hybrid IT
SAP customers have been at the forefront in embracing hybrid IT. This best-of-both-worlds approach lets them preserve and continue to leverage investments in mission-critical SAP ERP. At the same time, best-of-breed cloud applications help meet demands for greater business agility. A study by the IT software management vendor SolarWinds quantified what was widely recognized across the IT industry: Hybrid IT has become the de facto computing model. More than 80 percent of organizations run both core on-premises systems of record in tandem with cloud platforms and applications, the SolarWinds ...
10.30.17 by Sebastian Grady
Disruptive CIOs Are Driving Innovation by Breaking the Status Quo
CIOs are no longer just great technologists — in fact today's CIO can no longer afford to be just a great technologist. The successful CIO of tomorrow is a revenue generator, customer engagement guru, business leader. Successful CIOs are changing business models in their organization — they are becoming disruptors. But what does that mean exactly? While disruption was a bad word when we grew up — goofing off in class, talking during a movie, interrupting an adult conversation — today in business and technology, disruption is a magic word. The words "disruptive technology" were first coined by ...
10.25.17 by David Rowe
Overcoming the #1 Barrier to Digital Transformation
For years, IT has had clearly defined responsibilities: Keep critical business systems up and running, control costs and meet security and compliance requirements. Even today, most of your IT budget is likely spent keeping the lights on. But this traditional focus is holding organizations back in an era of accelerating focus on customer experience enabled via digital transformation. The role of IT is evolving quickly and becoming more prominent. Your key priorities should be shifting from predominantly maintaining current operations toward helping your company achieve its business objectives ...
10.11.17 by Seth A. Ravin
Welcome to Word on the Street
Welcome to our new blog — Word on the Street. There has never been a more complex and challenging time for IT leaders. They need to optimize their existing enterprise software investments, extend their current capabilities leveraging a hybrid computing model, and then transform into a digital enterprise via an intelligent, agile roadmap. We are launching Word on the Street as a resource for IT leaders to hear from industry experts and thought leaders, inside and outside of Rimini Street, who will share their observations and analyses of industry trends in optimization, capability extension an ...
10.09.17 by Hari Candadai
How Companies Are Accelerating Business by Innovating Around the Edges of ERP
As the pace of business change accelerates, businesses are seeking to transform IT to pull out in front of competitors. But you’ve already invested considerable people, time and money in implementing and customizing your ERP technology. How do you keep pace with change and continue to deliver new capabilities, while minimizing risk and ensuring core operations run smoothly and in compliance, without fail? Innovating around the edges of your ERP solutions can provide the agility you want and the dependability you need. Digital transformation is driving change and new expectations, and you need ...
10.09.17 by David Rowe
Three Ways CIOs Can Successfully Support Business Objectives
It's no secret that we're doing business in a fast-paced, disruptive environment. To keep pace with rapid change, IT is becoming more strategic, and expectations are growing. According to CIO , "boards of directors, CEOs and business colleagues are turning to the CIO to lead digital transformations, win customers and drive revenue." CIOs are feeling the weight of these new responsibilities, and they believe that it's more important than ever to closely align IT with business imperatives. In a recent study by the Society for Information Management (SIM), 42 percent of participants cited alignm ...
10.09.17 by Sebastian Grady
Are Hidden Costs of Software Maintenance Burying Your IT Department?
Your ERP apps like Oracle and SAP are the foundation of your business, and they’re becoming even more critical as digital transformation takes off. Chances are you’ve committed to a strong maintenance plan for your enterprise software to be sure it’s always delivering the performance and availability you need. But have you considered how much ERP maintenance is really costing you — and whether those funds can be put to better use? You typically pay your vendor an annual maintenance fee — perhaps two million dollars for a mid-sized enterprise. But under that fee are hidden costs that you incur ...