Rimini Street

Rimini Street

Seth Ravin, a former Siebel and Oracle executive, started Rimini Street in 2005 after Oracle acquired his previous venture, TomorrowNow. Las Vegas became the unlikely headquarters for a software maintenance firm that would fundamentally alter enterprise IT procurement. The company aggressively undercuts Oracle and SAP on annual support fees while promising faster response times and custom code fixes not available from the vendors themselves. The company targets a singular economic disruption: large enterprises running stable, mature enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) and database software do not need expensive upgrade-centric vendor maintenance. Rimini Street offers third-party support for Oracle Database, Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP Business Suite, and other widely deployed platforms, typically saving clients 50–90% on annual maintenance fees compared to the original vendor. Rather than funding new software licenses, clients redirect those savings toward digital transformation initiatives or cloud migration on their own timeline. The firm’s geographic reach covers the United States, Western Europe, and emerging markets including Latin America and Southeast Asia, where smaller companies especially value the cost advantage. Rimini Street went public in 2017 via a reverse merger after a near-decade of compound growth, though its trajectory was punctuated by a prolonged legal battle with Oracle that spanned from 2010 to 2016. The litigation centered on copyright infringement claims alleging the company misappropriated Oracle's intellectual property in its service delivery. A jury awarded Oracle $50 million in damages in 2015, and subsequent court rulings narrowed but did not fully reverse the finding—the firm paid the penalty and continued operating without material restrictions on its business model. As of early 2024, Rimini Street maintains approximately 2,100 active clients and employs roughly 1,600 professionals, with notable clients including 7-Eleven, Asahi Glass, and the UK's Office for National Statistics (per the firm's official communications, 2024). In addition to core third-party support, the company launched Rimini ONE, a consolidated managed services offering that blends application management, database management, and security advisory work into a single engagement, signaling an evolution beyond pure software support into broader enterprise IT outsourcing. The firm is structurally unusual in that it operates as a small-cap public company (Nasdaq: RMNI) whose revenue base competes directly with the largest enterprise software companies in the world — a rarity in the IT services sector where privately held consultancies dominate. Seth Ravin retains control as the largest individual shareholder through his super-voting Class B shares, which carry 10 votes each, insulating the company from activist pressure to merge with the very vendors it displaces. This governance setup preserves the company's adversarial posture toward incumbents, though it also concentrates power in a single individual with no clear succession plan publicly articulated.