VINCI Energies is a global organization comprised of 1,600 business units across 52 countries, all focused on helping public sector and business clients boost the reliability, safety and efficiency of their energy, transport and communications infrastructure, factories and buildings. The company is heavily reliant on its Oracle Database system and customized EBS application, but an increasing number of service and quality of support issues with the vendor triggered the company to review its software support and IT optimization options.
One example of the challenges VINCI Energies experienced with vendor support was a problem that arose due to VINCI Energies’ system reaching workload capacity. The company was at peak usage, and once a week they had to restart their system resulting in two hours of down time during business hours. While a ticket was raised with Oracle, they were unable to resolve the issue. After four weeks of back and forth with the vendor, VINCI Energies decided to pay Oracle to send a consultant onsite to try to fix the problem. This was an expensive approach as onsite consulting was not covered in their support agreement. While the onsite consultant was able to pin-point the issue, VINCI Energies questioned why this could not have been resolved with Oracle support over the phone. In response to this question, the company was told they had only “basic support,” and if they wanted better support, they would need to pay more.
“We became increasingly unhappy with the state of our enterprise support, and opted to explore alternatives outside of the software vendor,” said Julien Viala, director of IT Infrastructure, VINCI Energies. “What we have experienced to date with Rimini Street is a world of difference from what we experienced in the past – for example, we do not have to pay extra to receive better, faster support as we did with the vendor. And because Rimini Street supports all of our customizations, at no extra cost, we no longer have to pause before raising a support ticket to determine if the issue is based on vanilla code or one of our own customizations – this has lifted a huge burden off our shoulders.”
According to Rimini Street data from over 2,300 clients signed to date, 85% of all critical Priority 1 cases are related to a company’s customization to the software. Traditional software vendor support explicitly excludes support for software customizations, forcing customers to self-support their own customizations or outsource this support to an external consultant – adding to overall IT spend and draining internal resources.
As with all Rimini Street clients, VINCI Energies was assigned a primary support engineer (PSE) with an average of 15 years’ experience, and the company now enjoys a premium level of service compared to the call-center level support model provided by the vendor. Rimini Street has nearly 450 PSE’s around the world, who provide support 24/7 365 days a year, and a guaranteed service level agreement of 15 minute response time for all critical cases.
Advice to CIOs: “Stop Thinking the Old Way”
In addition to experiencing a vastly improved, ultra responsive service from Rimini Street, VINCI Energies realized several additional benefits by making the support switch. In addition to freeing up extra funds that were “hiding” in their enterprise software support fees paid to the vendor, the move to Rimini Street also enabled VINCI Energies to free up resources within its IT department to focus on key growth initiatives in the organization. Some of these initiatives included financing a move to the new IPv6 internet protocol with the money they saved on support, and digitizing all of VINCI Energies’ documents for greater efficiency, such as payroll and customer invoices.
“If I could offer any words of advice to a CIO who is fed up with their current enterprise support provider it would be this,” continued Viala. “Stop thinking the old way. Third-party support from Rimini Street is tried, tested and proven. Leverage their expertise and actively evolve and grow your ERP system under their support, and never look back.”
“VINCI Energies’ experience underscores the substantial benefits companies can receive when they move support for their mission-critical systems to Rimini Street, away from the outdated support model provided by the vendor,” said Seth A. Ravin, Rimini Street CEO. “CIOs in France and around the world are challenged every day to demonstrate the value they deliver to their organization. When companies switch to Rimini Street, we enable them to address this challenge by helping to unlock significant funds that they can invest in more strategic initiatives for their business. We continue to see increasing demand in the region, and already support more than 90 organizations with operations in France, helping them strategically optimize cost and maximize the value of their ERP landscape.”
About Rimini Street, Inc.
Rimini Street, Inc. (Nasdaq: RMNI) is a global provider of enterprise software products and services, and the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products. The company has redefined enterprise software support services since 2005 with an innovative, award-winning program that enables licensees of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and other enterprise software vendors to save up to 90 percent on total support costs. Clients can remain on their current software release without any required upgrades for a minimum of 15 years. Over 1,560 global Fortune 500, midmarket, public sector and other organizations from a broad range of industries currently rely on Rimini Street as their trusted, third-party support provider. To learn more, please visit https://www.riministreet.com, follow @riministreet on Twitter and find Rimini Street on Facebook and LinkedIn. (C-RMNI)
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