Frank Reneke is GVP of Professional Services for Rimini Custom™, a unique offering that extends Rimini Street’s support and services across the enterprise software landscape. With more than three decades of experience working across Oracle products, both inside of Oracle and with Rimini Support ™ for Oracle clients, Reneke has been at the forefront of the evolution of technology and how it impacts our clients. In this conversation, we discuss the recent Rimini Street and ServiceNow partnership announcement and how it helps Oracle EBS clients accelerate innovation.
Q: You’ve worked with Oracle EBS clients for many years, what was your first impression of this partnership announcement and the benefits it offers for clients evaluating their next move?
A: I joined Rimini Street in 2012, shortly after the release of Oracle EBS 12.2 and Oracle Fusion which had been positioned as the SaaS replacement for Oracle EBS. And as a 20+ year Oracle veteran, the Rimini Street and ServiceNow partnership announcement is exactly what the industry needs.
Before Rimini Street, I spent over two decades at Oracle managing upgrades and working with clients worldwide. I knew there had to be a better way. Traditional upgrade processes were fundamentally disruptive, often pulling entire departments into time-consuming testing from validation of workflows to integration testing and more, diverting them from their core work.
During my time at Rimini Street, I’ve held to my belief and have advised hundreds of Oracle 11.5.x, 12.1.x, and 12.2 customers that upgrading isn’t always the best path to innovation. Incremental improvements from upgrades or SaaS reimplementations rarely deliver true transformation, and so I find that it is valuable to clients that they realize they already have the tools needed to run their businesses effectively. Too often, the high initial cost of implementation prevents customers from fully leveraging Oracle software’s potential, while the perpetual upgrade cycle drains operational budgets, leaving little room for innovation.
Q: What are some of the advantages of leveraging these new business service capabilities from ServiceNow digital workflows for our Oracle clients?
A: If you’re on Oracle EBS 12.2 and you are getting updates from the vendor, the updates you get are basically a “take-it-or-leave-it” scenario and you have little say in what is in those updates. With the Rimini Street and ServiceNow partnership, Oracle customers are in control. You get to decide what’s important to your company and the business that you’re in. You can choose to implement technology that gives you an advantage over your competitors or that drives additional operational efficiency, allowing you to increase your overall margin on a particular service or product. It’s fundamentally different to today’s ERP upgrade approach, and it’s hugely empowering to organizations running on Oracle to now be able to add things like an improved user experience, automation, analytics and eventually, when ready, AI.
Q: What are your thoughts on the potential of bringing true innovation into the mix versus just an upgrade?
A: Let’s say your vendor delivers a generic Oracle EBS upgrade that offers little to no ROI, all the while incurring significant costs. You’re left paying steep support fees (consuming a large portion of your IT budget) while waiting for a meaningful change that justifies the effort, cost, and disruption of implementation, testing, production updates, and company-wide training. This approach leaves your business stagnant, waiting for innovation rather than driving it.
Now, contrast that with this new paradigm from Rimini Street. By freeing up to 75% of your IT budget spent on total support costs, you can reinvest in meaningful innovation that actively drives your business forward. Some of those options might be to reimagine how finance, accounting and supply chain operations work and the type of AI-enabled actions and the operational visibility you can have from executive level dashboards.
Q: How does the Rimini Street and ServiceNow partnership provide our Oracle clients with greater enterprise-wide visibility in key areas such as finance and supply chain operations??
A: The ServiceNow® App Engine offers a low-code solution that enables companies to bridge people, silos, and systems by using a unified platform to deliver streamlined user experiences – something that’s difficult to achieve with Oracle EBS. Low-code simplifies application development through visual interfaces, empowering non-technical users to build functional apps while allowing developers to accelerate complex tasks. This flexibility isn’t available in EBS, which relies on traditional programming methods.
The challenge is further compounded by the surge of SaaS supply chain applications purchased outside of IT’s control. These systems, often integrated with EBS, address functionality gaps that weren’t on the vendor’s roadmap. A vendor-driven, EBS-centric approach leaves you waiting for incremental improvements rather than innovating on demand.
With our ServiceNow partnership, the paradigm shifts from one application that does everything in a very “hub-and-spoke” framework to the App Engine enabling transparent, cross-platform collaboration within your organization, delivering better operational visibility across data sets using modern interfaces that work equally well on desktop and mobile devices. This empowers teams to create solutions tailored to their needs, driving efficiency and innovation across the board.
Q: Based on your work with clients, where do you see the most potential?
A: Automation. The goal of automation is to free teams from time consuming, repetitive tasks, allowing for improved efficiency, streamlined processes, and fewer errors. Today’s upgrade-centric ERP vendor roadmaps often don’t incorporate areas that are ripe for hyper-automation. You need companies like ServiceNow that bring automation (workflow), fast, low-cost application development (low-code), and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOPs).
Q: What are the top three things that Oracle clients should consider with the new options available from the Rimini Street and ServiceNow partnership?
A: Based on my experience and the feedback from our catalog of thousands of clients, here are my top three:
- Use artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps)
The ServiceNow AIOps platform consolidates disparate IT tools into a single unified, automated system, enabling more proactive and rapid responses to potential IT issues across multiple applications. Without this overall approach to AI, you’re left waiting on the application vendors to provide AI-specific features to their applications and left unable to make big improvements to the overall operational efficiency of the company. - Accommodate a new generation of digital workers
Digital workers, powered by AI capabilities, like machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), can work independently or alongside humans to perform complex actions. This innovation extends automation’s benefits from repetitive tasks to more complex processes, improving efficiency and productivity. - Enable low-code, no-code (LCNC) development
Low-code, no-code application development is a game changer for companies. It empowers users without technical expertise to design and implement automated processes with little to no coding required. This trend can accelerate the adoption of automation technologies, enabling rapid development and deployment of solutions and is one of the core strengths of the Rimini Street and ServiceNow partnership.
