Rimini Street, the leading third-party maintenance and support provider for enterprise software, including SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) software and Oracle Corporation's (NASDAQ: ORCL) Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, Oracle Database and Hyperion software, today announced that Southco, a leading international provider of engineered access hardware, recently completed the initial phase of its strategic SAP global expansion while utilising Rimini Street for support of its SAP ECC 6.0 system.
Like Southco, hundreds of companies around the world are leveraging third-party support from Rimini Street to reduce total support costs by up to 90% while continuing to advance the scope, scale and use of its enterprise software to achieve its business objectives. As a result, many Rimini Street clients, including Southco, are able to use their significant savings from third-party support to fund important business and IT improvements that directly affect their ability to better compete in the global marketplace.
Southco's software maintenance costs were second-highest IT expense
Southco serves tens of thousands of customers around the world across a wide range of industries, including the aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics and medical sectors. The company implemented its current SAP ECC 6.0 application in North America in 2008 to help manage mission-critical operations, including manufacturing, supply chain management, sales and distribution, and finance, with the intent of rolling out a single global SAP instance across every Southco location in the world.
Soon after the global recession began to affect the world economy, Southco chief information officer Brice Salle postponed globalisation efforts while he assessed the value of every dollar in his IT budget. As part of the assessment, he determined that software maintenance costs were the second-highest line item expense in the IT budget. After evaluating Rimini Street third-party support in 2009, Southco made the decision to switch from SAP to Rimini Street for support of its SAP ECC 6.0 system.
Savings help fund SAP global expansion to the UK and Asia-Pacific
By switching to Rimini Street, Southco immediately reduced its annual SAP maintenance fees by 50%. Furthermore, it was able to significantly add to its overall savings by cutting expensive support and maintenance costs associated with traditional software vendor support through Rimini Street's more efficient, personalised support programme, which includes 24x7x365 premium-level service, an assigned Primary Support Engineer (PSE), support for customisations at no additional fee, and support for a minimum of 10 years for existing releases without required upgrades and the cost avoidance of additional maintenance resources and required by the unnecessary overhead related to vendor support.
The substantial savings from Rimini Street third-party support allowed Southco to fund and resume its high-priority globalisation project in 2010. Southco finalised its rollout to the UK in 2011, followed by a successful rollout to four locations in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong in July of 2012.
"Global visibility and responsiveness to our customers are important components of Southco's business model and the reasons why this globalisation project is the company's number-one priority. Rimini Street has been a valuable partner in helping us successfully accomplish the globalisation of our SAP initiative with no impact to our business or our customers," said Salle. "We have been able to focus our internal resources on the rollouts in the UK and Asia while remaining confident that our PSE and Rimini Street team were ensuring a stable and supported SAP platform."
Southco is currently planning the next phase of global implementation at its single largest facility in the world in China next year. Additionally, it is planning rollouts in other locations in Asia, including Korea, Japan, Australia and India.
Rimini Street continues growth momentum as third-party support industry leader
Rimini Street is the third-party support provider of choice for more than 600 global, Fortune 500, mid-market and public sector organisations around the world seeking to fund and drive improvements that help to strengthen the organisation's overall performance. Clients include 71 of the Fortune 500 and 15 of the Global 100, with current support for client operations in more than 70 countries and the capability of supporting clients in nearly 200 countries.
"Southco is a great example of how organisations that switch to Rimini Street are using support cost savings to fund implementation of new functionality; expand system capabilities to new geographies, business units and subsidiaries; and fund growth initiatives that directly impact their bottom lines," said Seth Ravin, CEO, Rimini Street. "Rimini Street clients are innovative organisations that continually strive to improve their business performance while driving more value from their existing Oracle and SAP software investments. Hundreds of Rimini Street clients are enjoying our premium support offering, while taking advantage of 90% savings in their total support costs."
