Oracle and Rimini Street: Future partners?

Sebastian Grady, the president and chief operating officer, noticed that I made a funny face when he suggested that Oracle and Rimini Street could make good partners.

Why the face? Well, as you probably know, Oracle and Rimini, a third-party support provider, are embroiled in a lawsuit and counterlawsuit that started last year. Oracle claims that Rimini Street engaged in intellectual property theft in order to serve its clients; Rimini claims that Oracle is being anti-competitive. As of now, the trial is expected to start next year.

So because of that, I wondered why Grady would think the two could make good partners down the road.

He explained that Rimini could be the connective tissue that keeps Oracle customers using Oracle products, even if they’re running older releases no longer supported by Oracle. Rimini focuses on supporting Oracle application users who aren’t upgrading to the latest and greatest version of Oracle software. And so Grady’s argument here breaks down to two scenarios:

• Oracle customers fall off Oracle support but get support for older Oracle applications from Rimini. Then, when the company is ready to upgrade, they stick with Oracle.
• Oracle customers fall off Oracle support and run unsupported. Then, when the company is ready to upgrade, it more seriously considers moving to ERP software vendors like SAP.

It made a little more sense to me when put that way. What about you?