Rimini Street’s new model?
Denis Pombriant, managing principal, Beagle Research Group, LLC
Salesforce’s embrace of Rimini Street’s third-party support services is a significant departure that has transformed the support vendor from competitor to partner—at least with Salesforce. It might also offer insight into changing cloud business models. At least it helps to make sense of recent litigation involving Rimini and Oracle.
Rimini Street began life as a support vendor for enterprises running Oracle and SAP software in the traditional on-premise model. In this incarnation Rimini quickly and inevitably became a direct competitor taking support revenue from enterprise vendors. Competing for support revenue is legitimate provided the third-party vendor conducts itself lawfully, respecting patents and copyrights to intellectual property concerning the systems being supported. The third-party also has to grapple with providing patches and updates that an OEM can provide.
Typically, enterprise software vendors charge a flat percentage of the licensed software fee for support services. Regardless of the terms of the deal a business strikes with a vendor over the software purchase, the services fee is almost always calculated on the list price; so with fees around 20 percent an enterprise can end up re-buying the product every five years or so.
To be fair, there’s a significant cost built into providing service and support which includes on-going R&D, patches, updates, fixes, and bulletins, as well as live support based on a service level agreement of SLA. Customers are always trying to get a better deal and vendors need to hold the line on pricing to cover their costs and generate a profit, which is the point after all.
Third parties have a lower bar—since they don’t write the original software or upgrades their overhead is lower. But that’s the point. They don’t own the source code and so they can’t patch it, a key reason for buying support in the first place.
Rimini has announced what we can call “patches to patching” which it named holistic and virtual patching. But each of these ideas works several levels of abstraction above the source code never actually patching it. The result is that systems are still in jeopardy. So the basic low cost inducement of third-party support vendors is in some cases, specious. They charge less but they also deliver less and the difference can leave an enterprise vulnerable to hacking, and down stream effects like brand erosion and lost trust and lost revenue.
Oracle has had a long simmering law suit against Rimini, which exhausted the appeals process recently. In the verdict, Rimini was shown to have “borrowed” materials from Oracle by simply downloading them from support sites.
After Rimini lost on appeal, it issued a strange statement that was carried in the UK Register and elsewhere saying,
“The Court of Appeals, while affirming the jury’s finding of ‘innocent’ copyright infringement for processes that Rimini Street claims are no longer in use since at least July 2014, stated that Rimini Street‘ provided third – party support for Oracle’s enterprise software, in lawful competition with Oracle’s direct maintenance services,”
Which roughly translates as, we did nothing wrong and we won’t do it again.
It’s quite hard to provide in-depth support if you don’t have inside knowledge of how systems work and don’t have the source code which you need to make a patch. Oracle’s case revolved around Rimini Street’s appropriation of copyrighted support materials produced by Oracle. Specifically, the enterprise vendor accused Rimini of violating up to 93 copyrights on its support and materials and the judgements, including appeals, went against Rimini though some monetary awards were later reduced.
A new model
Since the rulings and fines, Rimini has been seeking a better way to do business and it may have found it with Salesforce. If so, it could be a new model for other cloud vendors as well.
Rimini provides 24/7/365 support for selected Salesforce applications, which now include Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, with 15 minute response time. Salesforce and other cloud vendors offer services for their products too but generally customers have to pay more for the advanced features that Rimini provides standard. So the competition is between Rimini and, in this case, Salesforce’s advanced support services, a choice that customers are free to make. Judging by the announcement of the services, Salesforce is in favor of the arrangement and views Rimini as a partner.
Here’s why. Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin recently told ZDNet,
“The SaaS world is different in that maintenance is included in licenses and mostly bare bones.”
Simply put, there’s more room in a cloud situation for Rimini to add value.
Let’s separate call center service from updates and patches. Only Salesforce patches its products and it does so whenever needed as well as with three annual updates. So, the thorny issue of third-party patching is off the table in the Salesforce model. No patching requirement makes it much less likely that Rimini or anyone else will need to do the things that Rimini was found guilty of in the Oracle case.
With a cloud business model a vendor builds support costs into the monthly fee and that includes further product development and enhancement as well as some amount of live support but the cloud vendor gets paid no matter what. There’s no haggling over service fees—either the customer buys what the OEM has or goes to a third-party and pays there. As a result it’s far easier for Rimini to be seen as a partner by a cloud vendor, than as a competitor.
So the difference in how support is delivered and paid for may turn out to be a significant additional inducement to legacy customers contemplating a move to the cloud. In any event, it is reasonable to conclude that the on-premise version of service and support may be going away.
My take
At some point companies like Oracle might begin to view third-party support service providers more as partners than competitors just as Salesforce does. But the change won’t be quick or uniform. Oracle’s bevy of cloud products still have numerous configurations that enable customers to straddle cloud and on-premise positions with different support modalities. For instance, Oracle’s BYOL, Bring Your Own License, program enables customers to move an on-premise app to Oracle’s infrastructure cloud (IaaS). So, the application retains its legacy character, and presumably its support liability, even though it runs in the cloud.
Deploying a modern, cloud version of the app might remove the annual support bill but at the cost of an incremental SaaS fee by the month or contract year.
Few enterprises will decide about moving to the cloud over the cost of application support alone. The move involves a complex matrix of costs for hardware and software—including everything in the stack. There are also considerations for labor. Given Oracle’s new push into automated products in database, security, integration and other areas we can expect cost savings for some premise-based systems but that remains to be seen.
Oracle is making its customers’ move to the cloud as cost effective as it knows how and it’s likely that early movers will get the best deals. Something else to consider for the vast majority of Oracle’s customer base with its feet planted firmly on the ground.
Platform logic
For some time now, it’s been my impression of the CRM market that all, or at least most, of the good ideas have been taken. It’s been a long time since we saw a new systemic solution that approaches front office business. It’s even been a long time since we saw a major innovation at the department level.
CRM itself was a systemic innovation in the last decade of the last century. Cloud-based CRM was the innovation of the new millennium and since then, marketing automation would count as a departmental innovation. You can also look at analytics as a systemic innovation because although it straddles departments, it has become a department itself.
This is not a bad thing, just the opposite. As CRM has been built-out it has opened new market niches which has maximized the number of solutions and, more importantly, it has made all of them affordable to just about any business. As I’ve said before, cloud computing is the commoditization of IT. It has made information processing both simple for a lay person to use and so affordable that all those who want it can have it.
CRM is far from done as an approach to business and as an economic driver, but we must acknowledge we’re at a turning point. Behind the scenes the major vendors, among whom are Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft, have gone a long way toward consolidating the industry by platform and from here that will be the dividing line.
So far this spring I’ve attended two conferences that illustrate my point, SuiteWorld and Financial Force’s analyst day. Each company has financials and ERP solutions that address the needs of small and medium and in some cases larger businesses. Each is deployed on a specific platform: NetSuite on its own which it announced is moving aggressively toward the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Salesforce whose solution encompasses development platform and infrastructure.
While it’s quite possible that many customers will continue using hybrid solutions such as NetSuite for back office operations and Salesforce in the front office, it’s already easy to see that situation morphing. Oracle has for many years used the logic of running a suite of related software over an integrated solution made up of best of breed apps. It is continuing this logical progression with NetSuite both on its own and as a member of the Oracle family.
Salesforce is using a derivative of this logic too. While Salesforce is and will likely always be a front office company, its powerful platform and AppExchange gives partners the ability to build completely compatible applications that help customers achieve suite status. After all, that’s the logic of having a platform to start with. A platform supplies a consistent set of programming tools, interfaces, objects, data structures and more—standards—so that apps built on it can interoperate. It’s the same logic as building a hardware bus so that manufacturers can build to common standards. It’s popular because it works.
So, the play as I see it for any software companies not named Oracle, Salesforce or a small group of others, is to pick a platform, become intimately involved with it, and pursue the surrounding ecosystem as your market.
Some vendors have begun working with two or more platforms and that’s fine if they have the resources, but I see that as a short-term gambit designed to see which platform vendor is the best partner.
All of this is vitally important. As I mentioned last time, the meme making the rounds is that it’s easier to start than grow a company, especially in tech. I can see this and deciding on a platform and an ecosystem to work in is one of those things that can help reduce overhead and enable a business to better focus on the things that really matter for growth, like markets and customers.
My two bits
CRM has been a wild ride for two decades and the ride continues. At this stage it’s important not to get sucked in to the latest discussions of digital disruption, IoT, analytics or anything else that looks bright and shiny. They’re all important as secondary considerations but I think the most important thing, and in some ways the least glamorous, to concentrate on is what vendor and which platform you want to work with over the next decade and beyond.
Markets converge. Fifteen years ago, few vendors had complete CRM suites and now they all do. Today we’re looking at far more complex and sophisticated front office applications as vendors take on vertical market apps. These apps combine back office data, front office processes, intelligence and machine learning and highly specialized subsystems for everything from manufacturing to healthcare. In this new environment who has time for platform incompatibilities?
Mark meet Larry
Ok, this is kind of long. Go get a cup of coffee.
Amid the anxiety and revelations of the Russia scandal including the Cambridge Analytica story that showed how easy it was to steal 50 million Facebook user profiles, it’s easy to mix up cause and effect. Importantly, Facebook wasn’t hacked or broken into but it was used as it was designed.
This has led some to question whether Facebook as such can exist at all in our pluralistic society while others believe the problem of surreptitious psychographic profiling will blow over once everyone plays by the same rules. After all, others have argued, other entities do the same thing. They point to Google, Amazon and even the traditional print industry as culprits for gathering personal data for analysis and, it should be said, weaponization.
Of course, the issue is manipulating and weaponizing the data. If we can’t trust the data, then we are disassembling one of the pillars of democracy, the acceptance of scientific rationalism. Boiled down, it means facts are facts even if you don’t like them.
If you remember a time before social media when identities were not so readily stolen and you think that reality was good, you might also recoil at the thought that those were the good old days, that things are now permanently different. There is a third option though and there are probably many that seek to balance the benefits of new technology with the protections we’ve grown accustomed to.
This article can’t be all things to all those people but it attempts to find safe harbor in a storm and therefore makes accommodations. If we can’t live with the compromises, perhaps it can at least point out some of the major obstacles to be over come.
Business model
It is an article of faith that Facebook’s business model, as well as those of other social networks and search engines, is selling advertising. But it is my contention that this model has run its course. It was effective when the companies were smaller, when their consumers were more innocent to the ways technology can be used for both good and ill purposes. The advertising model was even necessary in a time when the Internet was new and finding people and things was strange.
The advertising business model was a default that data aggregators took on the way to phenomenal profits and who could blame them. The tech sector has a habit of minting money and the founders of social media and search engines were merely the latest in a long line of prolific brainiacs who struck gold. It is hard to believe that any human in a similar situation would act much differently.
The latest dustup that dragged social media into the political spotlight now presents two choices to these businesses. They can hobble their products, which could reduce the amount of data they collect making them less interesting to advertisers, or they can change their business models slightly to prevent unethical use of their networks.
Disruptive innovation
Anytime a new technology reaches market, it has the possibility that it will disrupt the existing order of things. Disruptive innovations have coexisted with Capitalism since its origins in the Industrial Revolution. Disruptive innovation means making thread and then cloth with high-speed mechanical means, making a steam engine powerful and small enough to be mobile, or making a computer that could fit on a sliver of silicon about the size of your thumbnail.
The world changed with each of these disruptive innovations and others, because they immediately made an old order irrelevant and they organized whole economies and even civilizations around new driving forces. The Internet and its children are the latest innovations that have rocked the world. In each, humanity has had to grapple with both the benefits and the deficits of the innovations.
So far, we’ve benefitted enormously from these innovations but recently we discovered their less sanguine side. If history is a guide then regulation in some form is a likely next step. Some leaders in congress have already broached the idea on several occasions but it’s important to get the idea right before pulling the trigger, which is why we need to discuss business models.
Regulation?
Regulation could happen in social media and search but there’s much that the technology companies can do to either avert it or ensure that its mandate is as light and congruent with company interests as possible starting with the prevailing business model.
Although the advertising business model has served many companies well, they’ve morphed into data companies with big responsibilities for safeguarding the data they collect and that’s not something they’re eager for.
The big data gathering companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google and their competitors, have become data companies first and advertising vendors second and if this understanding had been realized sooner, many data breeches would in all likelihood have been thwarted. Rule One of business is never give away your product, it’s what you charge for because it pays the bills. Applying the rule should be as obvious as encrypting user data in this case. Additionally, no expectant user of the data should be able to access it in its unencrypted form without, of course paying, but more importantly presenting valid credentials and stating a beneficial and productive purpose of the use.
I’ve written before about credentialing and how it’s actually harder to pull permits to remodel your kitchen than it is to advertise any message you want on social media so I won’t perseverate. So let’s turn to encryption.
Security as a business model
Social and search’s business model must turn from advertising to data management, curation, and selling access to it and we live at precisely the moment when these activities are possible on a very large level. This includes encryption and the same form of certification that applies to other professionals from doctors to beauticians and plumbers.
Encryption and its reverse take time and require compute and storage resources which have often cut short discussions involving them because of cost considerations. But new, shall we say disruptive, innovations in computer hardware and software are reigniting the discussion.
In hardware data storage was long accomplished with the hard drives of most computer systems. Data enters and leaves storage on millisecond time scales, which is very fast. However, computer CPUs and memory operate one million times faster at nanosecond speeds. CPU chips spend a lot of time waiting for data to become available even when, as most modern computer systems do, there is memory caching for frequently used data.
Innovative hardware designs now offer solid-state memory devices that replace disks. This memory operates at nanosecond intervals and eliminates the lag time of older mechanical systems. What should we do with all of this newfound speed? One possibility might be to dedicate a small portion of it to encryption. Typical encryption modes on the market right now could be broken but that would take so many years that the resulting data, when finally available, would be useless and encryption is getting better.
Encryption would be a good thing but it wouldn’t solve all problems and securing our information infrastructure so that it operates more at utility grade, requires other changes. Bad software, malware, viruses, Trojan Horses, and the like may still get into systems.
Mark meet Larry
As luck would have it free markets generate inventions faster than they can be adopted. Often a disruptive innovation exists at the nexus of several disruptions that just need one more critical piece. That’s the case with many of the system level inventions that Oracle has brought to market over the last several years. They’ve pioneered important developments in solid state storage, encryption, chip sets that weed out intrusive malware, and a self-patching autonomous database that just hit the market.
All of these things turn out to be essential to safeguarding data which will enable the information revolution to continue burrowing its way into our lives and enriching society. They are also the underpinnings of a new business model that turns big data companies into ethical data providers. They might also continue being social media companies but the data tail would now be wagging the dog.
My two cents
What do I know? I just read and write a lot. But what I see is an industry about to be regulated and, in my mind, the smart play is for the social media companies to lead the charge to ensure they arrive at something they can live with instead of remaining aloof and having some regulations imposed on them.
There’s a wild west mentality in Silicon Valley in which what isn’t proscribed is encouraged. But we should keep in mind that the west only remained wild until the pioneers arrived and established towns with roads, schools, and churches. The wild bunch might have disliked the idea of settlement, they might have opposed it, but they were quickly in the minority and civilization won. That’s what’s happening in tech today and we all need to seize the moment.
Oracle is becoming a growth company again
Oracle is in a legitimate exponential growth phase and not for the first time in its long career. Like a startup it is growing much faster than the organic growth rate of the economy or its primary market because it has some new products that are highly desirable including cloud offerings and a unique fully autonomous database. It is also growing quarter by quarter and year over year—this is not a one-time thing. But unlike a typical startup that must claw and fight for every new customer, Oracle has the opportunity to sell its new products into an existing customer base that is hungry for improvements in their price-performance ratios.
Yesterday co-CEO’s Safra Catz and Mark Hurd plus Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison broke down the numbers for the just completed quarter and they were impressive with most of the growth coming from cloud computing including infrastructure, applications and platform services.
Total cloud and conventional software revenues were $8 billion, and Catz gave a blizzard of other positive numbers including,
Cloud staff revenue for the quarter was $1.2 billion, up 21% on a GAAP basis from last year in constant currency with — on non GAAP basis with Fusion Cloud revenues up 52% in constant currency. Cloud PaaS and IaaS revenues for the quarter were $416 million, up 24% from last year in constant currency. Cloud PaaS and IaaS revenue, excluding legacy posting services, saw growth of 49% in constant currency and 56% in U.S dollars. As legacy hosting services become smaller part of total PaaS and IaaS, the underlying growth of PaaS and next generation IaaS will be more visible.
You can find the whole announcement here as well as a transcript of the call here
Here are my observations.
First, only about 15 percent of the customer base has even begun moving to the cloud products meaning that more good news will likely be coming in future quarters and for some time. Much of the momentum comes from net new sales.
Second, the revenue gains are likely to accelerate as the company builds out its infrastructure support. Oracle announced earlier this year a drive to deploy xxx new data centers to support its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) initiative. Without those data centers being deployed and ubiquitous it can’t sell much infrastructure though even there it generated $416 million last quarter gaining 24 percent year over year.
But more is to come, and, now, infrastructure is a potential throttle. For instance, as the company will soon be able to service more customers with the same hardware or as Hurd put it,
As we fully deploy database multi-tenancy in our staff, let’s say. We double our capacity without spending one penny on hardware. We can help twice as many customers, twice as many transactions, twice as many users without spending one dollar.
Third, the new edition of the core database product, which is fully autonomous, is now generally available offering a level of efficiency and security unparalleled in the industry. On the call Ellison said there’s more to come.
Over the next few months, we expect to deliver autonomous analytics, autonomous mobility, autonomous application development and autonomous integration services.
If anything, Ellison may be underselling the benefits of the autonomous database when he talks about the labor-saving aspects as money savers as when he said,
Our highly automated suite of autonomous PaaS services reduces cost by reducing human labor and improves reliability and security by reducing human error.
For enterprise users, labor is cheap and although reducing human error is important the speed with which the autonomous database acts to self-correct may be the more significant benefit. Ellison revealed at OpenWorld that his customers can take upwards of 13 months to install database patches leaving their systems unnecessarily exposed for that time. The autonomous database self-patches meaning that users can install fixes much faster. Almost any cost associated with upgrading to the new database when compared to reputational hits and law suits over compromised data are insignificant in comparison.
Fourth Oracle is buying back shares and has a war chest of $70 billion. In the last quarter Catz said the company bought back $4 billion in shares, a process that is ongoing. The implication is that revenue and earnings numbers that are measured on a per share basis will likely improve simply because there are fewer shares outstanding.
Also, with so much cash on hand Oracle can pay for important things like further IaaS deployment and marketing to further push its products into the marketplace.
My take
The notable difference between Oracle and a startup is that the company can afford to be its own venture capitalist. Another difference is that in addition to being able to attract net new customers, it has a huge installed base to bring current. They’ve previously said the process could take 10 years or more so it is still early days.
Unlike many other players in the market, Oracle has seen the need for greater security measures to combat the threats in the world today. Oracle is the logical player to deal with security since so many of the world’s applications are based on its technology infrastructure.
It will take some time before the technology diffuses through the industry and IT becomes a more secure environment. But it won’t take ten years. Plenty of companies will need to upgrade their applications independently of what Oracle does now that new tools are available. As it makes this turn to cloud computing Oracle is laying the foundations for a global information utility that can address today’s challenges.
But Oracle can’t do the job alone. Current news demonstrates that the Internet and social networks are no better at security than a screen door against a winter gale. The information utility will need more encryption and professionalization of its user class. In addition to having proficiency with the technology, users need to be easily identified, perhaps through license numbers, and certified in the ethical use of the technology.
You might not realize it but a plumber has to get a permit before working on your natural gas feed. It’s not an onerous process if the individual can demonstrate (via his or her license) the basic competence to do the job. We’re getting to that point in IT right now.
Salesforce’s triangulation strategy
Announcements may be playing the role usually reserved for M&A activity in the CRM world right now. Generally a company purchases another when it wants to capture the benefits of another business’ R&D or established market base. But at the moment it appears that the desirable partners are too big to swallow and the result is more partnering between the big guys and the really big guys. Salesforce has been pursuing this strategy for most of the last year with Amazon, Google, and IBM. This says a lot about the state of the marketplace on several fronts.
First Salesforce and Amazon announced a partnership in which Amazon and its AWS infrastructure service would become Salesforce’s strategic infrastructure partner when Salesforce absolutely had to deploy a data center in a foreign land.
This makes perfect sense. As I have often said, it makes no business sense to build (in this case a datacenter) when you can purchase the solution at a reasonable price on the open market. As a competitive issue, Salesforce’s choice of Amazon is a direct challenge to Oracle because it offers a safe haven enabling Salesforce to diversify its partner portfolio while keeping Oracle and Microsoft at arms length. Given the rumors of salesforce being acquired by a big tech firm over the last few years, this seems a good way to help preserve its independence.
Much the same can be said of the alliance with Google. This is primarily a play for more SMB business and it’s a good one. Salesforce and Google announced their partnership around G Suite, Google’s free office apps. A while ago Salesforce and Microsoft created an integration with Outlook effectively making Outlook another UI for Salesforce. This parallels Microsoft’s own integration with its CRM and Outlook. So this partly neutralizes Outlook as a differentiator in any CRM decision.
Google integration gives Salesforce access to all those G Suite users who need CRM, especially in the SMB space. It also gives Salesforce another way to compete against Microsoft CRM. But, of course, they didn’t stop there. Salesforce also now has an integration with Google Hangouts too, an effective counter to Skype which is now owned by Microsoft.
Away from the SMB space in the Enterprise market Salesforce also forged a relationship with Google Analytics. Not that they need more analytics but the two partners have developed plausible processes that use Google Analytics to surface macro trends and Salesforce Einstein to go the last mile, a model that works with IBM too.
Last week Salesforce and IBM got closer with Salesforce naming IBM a preferred cloud services provider and IBM calling Salesforce its preferred customer engagement platform for sales and service. The agreement leverages IBM’s Watson analytics and its cloud as well as Salesforce Quip (more office software) and Service Cloud Einstein.
In all of this we can see that Salesforce is working to maintain its independence by linking with anything that can enhance its CRM and make it less desirable as an acquisition target. But of greater importance, it’s these relationships and others like them that will help Salesforce reach its goal of $20 billion in revenues in a few years. When your revenue needs are this big, you need to leverage the market penetration of similar companies. And while all of the companies named are bigger than Salesforce, they each need the bragging rights of working with the most popular CRM in the world.
Another question in all this is what’s happening with M&A activity, which seems to lull while partnerships blossom. The merger market is notorious for running hot and cold and right now it seems tepid, like there’s more opportunity for large companies like Salesforce crafting relationships with bigger partners. It’s not clear if this means there are few attractive acquisitions out there or simply that the times require different approaches to the market.
More than once in talks since Dreamforce in November Marc Benioff has used the logic, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. This logic is being played out in the partnerships his company is spawning. On one level it’s just smart business but in the back of my mind, I see the information utility of the 21st century forming. It will resemble the current electric utility in that no single provider will dominate and a high degree of interoperability will be needed. Standards like 120 volt and 60 Hertz electricity are what give us the impression of a continental electric utility grid but in reality, the grid is made up of smaller vendors adhering to the standards.
Likewise there’s no single vendor capable of dominating the information utility market and standards will be vital. That’s why it’s so important when a company like Salesforce announces partnerships. These incremental agreements have more significance that the press releases might allude to. They are steps on the road to something bigger.
