Somewhere inside a large company, a 15-year-old enterprise system is doing exactly what it was built to do. It closes the books. It tracks inventory. It knows which tax code applies in São Paulo and which shipment is stuck in Singapore. Nobody loves its interface. Everybody fears the week it stops. The conventional answer is an upgrade, a migration or a trip to the cloud. Rimini Street has spent two decades offering a more impolite answer: leave it alone.
The Las Vegas company replaces annual support from software vendors including Oracle, SAP and VMware. Its engineers fix defects, support custom code, provide tax and regulatory updates, manage applications, protect systems and keep mismatched technologies speaking to one another. The customer keeps the software license. Rimini Street takes over much of the care and feeding.
This is not a tiny maintenance shop living on forgotten software. Rimini Street reported $421.5 million in revenue for 2025. By June 2026 it had 3,132 active clients, $412.8 million in annualized recurring revenue and a 90 percent trailing-year revenue-retention rate. In the second quarter, subscriptions produced 92.9 percent of revenue. The old software business is, rather neatly, a modern recurring-revenue business.
The maintenance bill nobody frames
Founder Seth Ravin knew the bill from the inside. Before starting Rimini Street in 2005, he worked at PeopleSoft and later ran TomorrowNow, another third-party maintenance provider. His opening proposition was blunt: support enterprise applications for more than 50 percent less than the vendor’s annual fee. Vendor support is Rimini Street’s first competitor and its best sales brochure.
What does the buyer get? A named engineer, 24-hour coverage, support for customized code and a roadmap not tied to the vendor’s release calendar. Rimini Street says stable releases can remain supported for 15 years or more. In 2025 its critical and serious cases generally reached an experienced engineer in under two minutes, compared with the company’s standard 10-minute guarantee. Its 1,160-plus support engineers, developers and specialists carry an average of more than 20 years of relevant experience.
Customers range from manufacturers and utilities to universities, retailers and public agencies. At the end of 2025 the list included 78 Fortune 500 companies and 20 members of the Fortune Global 100. They are not shopping for entertainment. They are buying uptime, scarce expertise and, most of all, time before a costly platform decision becomes unavoidable.
“The real product is not cheaper support. It is the right to decide when your software changes.”YesPress analysis
What fails first
The first failure is rarely the ERP. It is confidence in the arrangement around it. A support ticket comes back with a suggestion to upgrade. A vendor deadline turns a functioning release into a board-level emergency. A customization becomes too peculiar for a generalist help desk. Or the annual renewal arrives while the CFO is asking every department to find savings.
That is the moment Rimini Street sells into. Pan Ocean chose third-party support for a highly customized Oracle E-Business Suite environment rather than accept a disruptive cloud move. Federation University wanted one provider to stop the ritual of vendors pointing at each other across the application, database and operating-system layers. SP Electricity North West reported that the change removed recurring SAP problems, cut maintenance costs by 50 percent and improved service-desk efficiency by 10 percent.
The trigger changes. The pattern does not: the customer stops viewing an upgrade as maintenance and starts viewing it as an investment competing against every other investment. Once that mental switch happens, “because the vendor says so” is no longer a business case.
The operating sequence
Rimini Street calls this the Smart Path. The useful idea is the order: savings are created before the innovation project asks for money.
From mechanic to general contractor
Support was the wedge. The catalog now extends well beyond it. Rimini Manage runs applications and technology. Rimini Protect adds security controls. Rimini Connect handles interoperability. Rimini Watch monitors performance. Rimini Consult provides project work, roadmaps and custom development. Workday named the company an application-management partner in 2025. T-Systems North America and American Digital add infrastructure and cloud capabilities. Security partners include Vali Cyber, Trellix, RedShield and Waratek.
That expansion makes strategic sense and creates a harder comparison. In support, Rimini Street can stand opposite a large software vendor and emphasize price, response time and custom-code knowledge. In managed services and consulting, it meets Accenture, IBM, Wipro, Capgemini and DXC. Those firms have broader relationships and much larger benches. Rimini Street’s answer is that one team already understands the awkward, customized systems underneath the project.
The model is a land-and-expand loop. Win the support renewal. Learn the environment. Add security or application management. Then get invited into the roadmap conversation. It is a service business with software-like retention and a deep incentive to become the person a CIO calls before calling the vendor.
AI upstairs, ERP in the basement
The newest act is more interesting than attaching “AI” to a support contract. Rimini Street’s architecture treats the existing ERP as a dependable transaction engine and places a modern engagement layer over it. Rimini Agentic UX, built with ServiceNow, is meant to orchestrate work across old systems without replacing them. In January 2026, the company released 20 packaged solutions for jobs such as purchase requests, material setup, shipment exceptions, expenses and compliance.
The image is easy to understand: keep the plumbing, replace the faucets. An employee sees a role-specific workflow instead of wandering through an antique menu tree. An agent can validate a request, collect approvals and update records across systems. The company says early projects have shortened approval and order cycles, though buyers should treat those figures as case outcomes, not laws of physics.
Rimini Govern for AI, launched in July 2026, pushes the company into agent oversight: governance, security, interoperability and ROI measurement. This is a larger bet than support. Oracle, SAP, Palantir, UiPath, global integrators and the major AI platforms are all chasing parts of the same budget. Rimini Street’s advantage is context. Its risk is that context does not automatically become a great AI product.
The expensive boundary lesson
No honest account can skip Oracle. The companies fought for roughly 15 years over the way Rimini Street performed some support for Oracle licensees, copyright notices and public statements. A 2015 jury found copyright infringement involving 93 Oracle software products. Rimini Street paid a judgment of about $124.4 million in 2016 and continued appealing parts of the case.
In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously for Rimini Street on a narrow issue: the phrase “full costs” in the Copyright Act did not let courts award litigation expenses outside the categories Congress specified. The ruling reduced a cost award; it did not erase the underlying infringement findings.
A confidential settlement in July 2025 set a path to finish the second case. Oracle returned about $37.9 million of roughly $58.7 million in fees and costs Rimini Street had paid in late 2024. Rimini Street, in turn, agreed to wind down support for Oracle PeopleSoft products by July 31, 2028 and meet reporting and certification obligations. The clean lesson is operational, not rhetorical: a business that sits between a licensee and a powerful vendor needs precise boundaries, auditable processes and no improvisation around access rights.
Where this does not work
Third-party support is a weak fit when a company needs vendor-only releases or certifications, depends on the newest vendor patches, is already committed to a near-term migration, or lacks the governance discipline to map licenses, customizations and access rights before switching.
What to steal
Rimini Street’s most reusable idea is not “never upgrade.” It is to separate maintenance from transformation. A functioning system does not become a transformation project merely because its vendor has a new version. Make the proposed migration compete for capital on measurable outcomes: lower cycle time, fewer errors, better controls, happier users or genuine revenue.
- Inventory the boring stuff. List licenses, custom code, integrations, tax updates, security controls and vendor certifications before pricing an alternative.
- Start at the renewal date. The natural buying window is when support can change without paying two providers at once.
- Ring-fence the savings. Move the difference into a named modernization budget before it dissolves into general cost reduction.
- Modernize one workflow. Put a better experience over a painful process and measure time, error rates and handoffs before scaling.
- Write the exit plan first. Know which event - a security requirement, acquisition, regulation or product deadline - would send you back to the vendor or into a migration.
Rimini Street works best when the core is stable, deeply customized and unexciting; when the organization values control over novelty; and when savings can fund a visible next move. It works badly when delay is being dressed up as strategy. Old software is not automatically good software. But neither is new software automatically progress.
That distinction has carried Rimini Street from a half-price support pitch to a public company with nearly 2,000 employees. Its next question is harder: can the people who made old ERP less painful make AI useful without turning “transformation without disruption” into just another transformation slogan? For thousands of companies with a working system and an unwelcome renewal notice, it is at least a question worth pricing.