Rimini Street offers AI magic without the forced ERP migration

Rimini Street is broadening its pitch to CIOs in Australia and New Zealand beyond lower enterprise software support costs, positioning agentic AI and governance on top of existing ERP estates as an alternative to vendor-led migrations.

The company's argument is that organisations do not have to move a functioning ERP platform to a vendor's latest cloud product before they can pursue AI-led automation. Instead, it is advocating an architecture in which the ERP remains a system of record, while data, orchestration and agentic AI capabilities sit above it.

That marks a shift in emphasis for a company long associated with third-party support for enterprise applications. Rimini Street still promotes a 50% reduction in annual support fees compared with vendor support, but its ANZ technology leadership is increasingly framing the larger opportunity as avoiding or delaying a costly modernisation programme that may not match a customer's own timetable.

Beyond savings

Rimini Street's proposed model is to maintain the existing ERP, use the savings to improve or clean up the environment, and then add new capabilities through external data and orchestration layers. The company argues that this approach lets organisations focus investment on business processes rather than on replacing the underlying transaction system.

"Maintain your existing ERP. Then invest in that data fabric layer, invest in that orchestration layer, and don't have the vendors force you down their roadmap. Drive your own roadmap around your own data layer and your own orchestration layer. That's the message. Treat your ERP as just another system of record, and we'll maintain it for you," said Tal Nathan, Chief Technology Officer (ANZ), Rimini Street.

Nathan also argued that Australian IT organisations can be particularly influenced by vendor roadmaps. He said internal enterprise architecture capability has weakened in some organisations as budgets have tightened and strategy work has shifted towards software vendors and global systems integrators.

The result, he said, can be a technology agenda organised around products and upgrade cycles rather than operational outcomes such as supply-chain performance, financial close times or customer acquisition.

AI layer

Rimini Street is not seeking to replace specialist data or AI platforms. Nathan pointed to data-fabric products such as Databricks as one way to extract and work with information held in ERP systems, while describing ServiceNow as one option for orchestrating agentic workflows across applications.

The company says it has developed reference architectures for agentic AI in ERP environments and has recipes for around 20 business processes. Its stated approach is technology-agnostic at the data and orchestration layers, with customers able to bring their own tools.

"Yep, and we'll give you the playbook of how to do it today, and we're not competing for the playbook. It's completely agnostic," added Nathan.

That distinction is central to the proposition. Rimini Street is seeking to remain focused on support, integration and governance around the ERP estate rather than competing directly with AI model providers or orchestration vendors.

Nathan described the alternative as a multi-year ERP transformation that can absorb a large share of an IT budget before an organisation begins pursuing new capabilities. Rimini Street's pitch is that companies can separate those decisions: retain the core system if it still works, while investing elsewhere in the stack.

Governance controls

The next part of the strategy is governance. Nathan said Rimini Street has partnered with ServiceNow to build governance tools intended to monitor agents operating against ERP processes, including permissions, execution, audit trails and logging.

"We're moving towards governance on top of the agentic layer. We've partnered with ServiceNow around building governance tools that monitor the process that the agents are running. Because you're talking here about systems of record. You're not talking about generating a PowerPoint or writing an email. So putting those governance and business rules in place to make sure: what are those agents doing? Have they got the right permissions to perform those tasks? Are we training them and monitoring them? Are they executing effectively? Have we got an audit trail and a logging trail? Have we got visibility of what they're doing at any given point? So we've got a dashboard to say accounts receivable, as an example, we've got that green - agents are processing actively; amber over there in terms of customer support. So we're providing that visibility, which is something many organisations are claiming or doing, but we're doing it off actual ERP processes," said Nathan.

The governance layer does not extend to every downstream rule governing how information is ultimately distributed. Nathan said Rimini Street's role is focused on integration into the ERP, access to data and monitoring afterwards, while configuration of the ServiceNow environment determines how distribution rules are applied.

"So it's not really our discussion in the sense that we're not going after the orchestration market, and definitely not after the AI market. What we're doing is exposing to the client a reference architecture and model, as well as a governance layer to allow them to do it. If the client wants to bring in their own orchestration tool, we will help them plug it in and govern and monitor it. If the client wants to use a tool like ServiceNow or another external no-code orchestration tool, again, perfectly fine. We're not prescriptive. We're only prescriptive around our governance-as-a-service platform that we built on top of ServiceNow," added Nathan.

Long support

Keeping older ERP platforms in production also raises questions about security, tax and regulatory changes. Nathan said Rimini Street maintains its own teams in those areas and supports required legislative, tax and regulatory changes for the applications it covers.

On security, the company's position is that patching should not be treated as the sole control for ERP environments. Nathan argued that patching complex ERP systems can involve regression testing and quality assurance, creating a window between vulnerability disclosure and deployment, and said Rimini Street instead uses a broader set of controls.

The company also sees longevity as a core part of the offer. Nathan said some customers have remained with Rimini Street for long periods, while departures are often tied to mergers and acquisitions, decommissioning or a decision to consolidate onto another organisation's ERP estate.

For some SAP services, Rimini Street offers support for 15 years from the point a customer signs, although that does not guarantee what happens after the initial term.

"For some of the services like SAP, we offer 15 years' support from the point of signing, which is an incredibly high level of surety. It's not to say at the end of the 15 years we may not renew. It's just irresponsible as an organisation to commit to an obligation, even a 15-year obligation. That's unheard of in this industry," said Nathan.