“I have a tremendous amount of respect [for Oracle]”: Rimini Street CEO discusses the Oracle lawsuit, what’s next and agentic AI

Seth Ravin speaks to CRN Australia about the 15 year long lawsuit and what the company has its sights set on.

In July this year, Rimini Street and Oracle signed a settlement agreement after 15 years of back and forth. The litigation all began back in 2010, when Oracle sued Rimini Street over copyright infringement and a back and forth of legal battle began.

Looking at the battle between the companies, one of the learnings CEO at Rimini Street Seth Ravin has taken from it is that the evolution of technology means people will be inventing things that kill other things.

“If you're going to break open a new industry, if you're going to go out there and do something that takes money out of the pockets of other competitors in other industries, this is the way it works,” he said.

“Imagine, even at Google, there's been concern, because their ad revenue was down because people are using Gemini and other AI, and it's bypassing all those ads that was in that format.

“The world is changing, every time the world changes, somebody's going to win, somebody's going to lose, and technology moves on.”

Ravin noted that coming out and offering alternatives to some of the biggest software companies in the world, creating competition to their most profitable lines of business they will end up in a “rough neighbourhood”.

“You have to have the tenacity, the understanding and the belief of what you're doing and believing. We fought for 19 years, that's a long time. I was a young man when that battle started. I had hair,” he said.

But has all this back and forth left a sour taste in his mouth? According to Ravin, it hasn’t.

“I have a tremendous amount of respect [for Oracle]. I mean, look what Larry [Ellison] and Safra [Catz] have built,” he noted.

“They're infrastructure technology people, and they run a technology company that's a powerhouse.

“I have different ideas about how to potentially serve customers. I have different ideas about different solutions, but is there not enough space in our technological world for different choices and options that customers can look at and say, I want this one or I want that one?”

As we have choices in our consumer life, Ravin said we need the same choices in our business life.

“That is the sign of a healthy market,” he explained.

“Everyone should have choices in every part of every piece of technology, and we are just happy to be part of the landscape. I think we were going to present some really exciting choices to the market.”

Now that the battle is done, Ravin said Rimini Street’s mission is “exactly what it was before”.

“[Our aim is] to drive value out of these big systems, to make sure customers can process these ten core processes to run their business or a government agency in a new technology,” he said.

“I think everybody's just really giddy and just get their hands around so much stuff that's happening.”

Ravin said that Rimini Street’s customers still trust the company to help them move into the next generation.

“While, again, driving value out of their current systems for years to come, guaranteed. So, they're not in a rush, they don't have to think, oh, we're not pulling the plug on their support and leaving them hanging. We're saying: it's still good for years to come,” he explained.

“But meanwhile, we could take this journey at whatever pace. Works for you guys, financially, technologically, and take time to learn how this stuff can work and let's do it thoughtfully.”

Rimini’s agentic AI plan

Now that the decades-long litigation with Oracle is behind Rimini Street, Ravin, now has his eyes on agentic AI.

Ravin told CRN Australia he is “very excited” and “very busy” as the company is taking advantage of agentic AI to transform their legacy ERP processes.

“We're entering the agentic era, we're moving from ERP systems to agentic AI ERP. We are the guys who are going to extract these age old processes out of these big systems, like extracting DNA,” he said.

Through agentic AI, Ravin said ERP is moving into a whole “new technical paradigm”.

"We've had ERP systems since the 60s, but this is the first time we are really going through a full transformation,” he explained.

“Now it'll take years for this to happen, but we're already placing the new agentic AI ERP, over the top of the existing systems. We're not spending money on upgrades. We're not spending money on new migrations, because that technical platform has reached its peak.

“There's a new technology, so why would you spend money going down that path when we can extend the life of the existing systems and then build on top of that one piece at a time?”

As Rimini Street is bringing a new agentic AI version of ERP processing, Ravin said they are decommissioning the old system.

“But we don't do it overnight, it's not a big bang theory, where we turn one off and on. That's what makes this so exciting is that companies can go at their own pace,” he explained.

“We can actually work within the existing IT budget because we come in at the first stage, we take over all these systems for support, cut the cost in half of what they're paying to the vendor, they don't have to spend the money on the upgrades and migrations, and we use that savings to pay for the new innovation.

"We leapfrog over all this upgrade, migration of technology that's already end of life. It's exciting, because I haven't had this much fun since we came out with the Internet.”