Nottinghamshire County Council Renews Support Agreement With Rimini Street for Its Mission-Critical SAP Applications

Rhea-AI Summary

Rimini Street, Inc. (Nasdaq: RMNI) has secured a renewed support agreement with Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) for its SAP ECC 6.0 and SAP Business Objects software. This partnership, first established in 2017, allows NCC to maintain essential services while significantly cutting maintenance costs. The council achieved a 56% budget cut and reduced staff without compromising critical functions like payroll. With Rimini Street’s expert support, NCC ensures its software systems remain operational for at least 15 years, thereby enhancing operational efficiency during challenging budget constraints.

Positive

• NCC achieved substantial savings in maintenance costs since switching to Rimini Street.
• Support agreement guarantees essential software support for a minimum of 15 years.
• Rimini Street's services allowed NCC to reduce accounts payable staff from 20 to 7, maintaining a 96% invoice completion rate.

Negative

• None.

Rimini Street, Inc. (Nasdaq: RMNI), a global provider of enterprise software products and services, the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products and a Salesforce partner, today announced that Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) has renewed its agreement with Rimini Street for Support of its SAP ECC 6.0 and SAP Business Objects software. NCC first switched to Rimini Street in 2017, achieving substantial savings in maintenance fees over the last three years, as well as related savings in avoided upgrades, process efficiencies and customization support, included at no additional charge. At a time of significant strain on public sector budgets, NCC renewed its agreement with Rimini Street to continue to achieve these essential savings as the local authority seeks to drive efficiencies in its back-office IT systems. Additionally, NCC has the reassurance that their software systems will be supported for a guaranteed minimum of 15 years from the time they switched to Rimini Street Support. This level of support gives the organization confidence its core business applications will be maintained without disruption to critical services such as payroll for employees and protection services for young children.

Nottinghamshire County Council Renews Support Agreement with Rimini Street for its Mission-Critical SAP Applications (Photo: Business Wire)

Delivering Essential Services While Driving Down Support Costs

Nottinghamshire County Council, located in the United Kingdom, serves a population of approximately 828,000¹ with around 400 adult and child services². Since the financial crisis in 2008, NCC has faced significant pressure to reduce expenditure across the organization. The Business Services Center (BSC) cut budgets by 56% and reduced headcount by 66% while continuing to operate its key business management systems required to deliver critical functions like payroll and paying stipends to foster carers looking after children. Despite these reductions, NCC has maintained the full range of adult and child services it is expected to run.

Due to budget cuts, the BSC adopted many digital services, including automation, to reduce the handover points between teams and minimize the number of people involved in transacting with systems. Four years ago, the Council set further ambitious targets to reduce spending within the BSC, which meant finding new ways to make savings. The BSC identified the significant fees being paid for their SAP support and maintenance as too high for the value returned, and NCC was dissatisfied with the quality of service provided by the vendor. For example, there were no Service Level Agreements (SLAs) when raising support tickets, and the team often had to chase SAP to get a response. The IT department identified third-party support to lower these high costs and selected Rimini Street’s ultra-responsive support program.

“Rimini Street has been an incredibly reliable and trusted partner and has given us the confidence that our core SAP applications are stable so we can now concentrate on supporting our frontline colleagues,” said Sarah Stevenson, group manager, Business Services Center, Nottinghamshire County Council. “There is significant pressure to drive cost reductions in our budget, but at the same time continue to maintain all our essential services and find ways to innovate. Rimini Street understands the importance of quality customer service, which not only delivers significant savings but gives us more time to plan for the future without the pressure of needing to follow a vendor-led upgrade path.”

Due to the support by Rimini Street’s team of experts, NCC was able to reduce and redeploy its staff dedicated to accounts payable from 20 to seven people, still achieving a 96% completion rate for paying supplier invoices – even during the COVID-19 pandemic. NCC also runs payroll for between 35,000 – 38,000 pensioners and pays its 7,000 staff, which is a complex task due to the different ways staff are paid. Rimini Street’s tax, legal and regulatory support services help ensure on-time pay awards, tax table changes, and system updates are made with minimal disruption.

NCC’s SAP applications support more than 6,000 users operating across nine county offices and numerous satellite locations, and now also thousands of home locations due to the pandemic. The Company regularly provides advice and guidance to NCC on the potential impact of changes to its core SAP applications and runs patching updates. Previously, this would cost over £100,000 per year as NCC would need to bring staff in over the weekend to complete the update and take the application offline to perform it. NCC is planning to eventually rebuild its architecture and move its SAP applications to a Microsoft Azure datacenter to ensure greater data integration between internal systems and that employees have consistent access to the same information to do their jobs more efficiently.

The Confidence of a Trusted Support Partner

NCC, as with all Rimini Street clients, benefits from the Company’s flexible, premium-level enterprise software support model, including its industry-leading SLA of 10-minute response times for all critical Priority 1 cases. Clients are also assigned a Primary Support Engineer, backed by a team of functional and technical experts with an average of 15 years’ experience in the client’s specific enterprise software system.

“NCC demonstrates that public sector organizations facing demands to cut costs and deliver essential services can turn to third-party support as a way to minimize disruption and redirect funds,” said Gerard Brossard, executive vice president and chief operating officer, Rimini Street. “We have been able to show NCC that moving to cloud SaaS applications is not the only route available to public sector organizations as they plan their future IT strategies. Rimini Street’s business is support, and our only role is to help our customers ensure their stable, mission-critical systems perform to the highest levels of reliability and availability.”

Learn more about Nottinghamshire County Council’s success with Rimini Street.

About Rimini Street, Inc.

Rimini Street, Inc. (Nasdaq: RMNI) is a global provider of enterprise software products and services, the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products and a Salesforce partner. The Company offers premium, ultra-responsive and integrated application management and support services that enable enterprise software licensees to save significant costs, free up resources for innovation and achieve better business outcomes. To date, more than 3,700 Fortune 500, Fortune Global 100, midmarket, public sector and other organizations from a broad range of industries have relied on Rimini Street as their trusted application enterprise software products and services provider. To learn more, please visit http://www.riministreet.com, follow @riministreet on Twitter and find Rimini Street on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements included in this communication are not historical facts but are forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements generally are accompanied by words such as “may,” “should,” “would,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” “seem,” “seek,” “continue,” “future,” “will,” “expect,” “outlook” or other similar words, phrases or expressions. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our expectations of future events, future opportunities, global expansion and other growth initiatives and our investments in such initiatives. These statements are based on various assumptions and on the current expectations of management and are not predictions of actual performance, nor are these statements of historical facts. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties regarding Rimini Street’s business, and actual results may differ materially. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the duration of and operational and financial impacts on our business of the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic impact, as well as the actions taken by governmental authorities, clients or others in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; catastrophic events that disrupt our business or that of our current and prospective clients, changes in the business environment in which Rimini Street operates, including inflation and interest rates, and general financial, economic, regulatory and political conditions affecting the industry in which Rimini Street operates; adverse developments in pending litigation or in the government inquiry or any new litigation; our need and ability to raise additional equity or debt financing on favorable terms and our ability to generate cash flows from operations to help fund increased investment in our growth initiatives; the sufficiency of our cash and cash equivalents to meet our liquidity requirements; the terms and impact of our outstanding 13.00% Series A Preferred Stock; changes in taxes, laws and regulations; competitive product and pricing activity; difficulties of managing growth profitably; the customer adoption of our recently introduced products and services, including our Application Management Services (AMS), Rimini Street Advanced Database Security, and services for Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products, in addition to other products and services we expect to introduce in the near future; the loss of one or more members of Rimini Street’s management team; uncertainty as to the long-term value of Rimini Street’s equity securities; and those discussed under the heading “Risk Factors” in Rimini Street’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed on November 5, 2020, and as updated from time to time by Rimini Street’s future Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and other filings by Rimini Street with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, forward-looking statements provide Rimini Street’s expectations, plans or forecasts of future events and views as of the date of this communication. Rimini Street anticipates that subsequent events and developments will cause Rimini Street’s assessments to change. However, while Rimini Street may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, Rimini Street specifically disclaims any obligation to do so, except as required by law. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing Rimini Street’s assessments as of any date subsequent to the date of this communication.

© 2021 Rimini Street, Inc. All rights reserved. “Rimini Street” is a registered trademark of Rimini Street, Inc. in the United States and other countries, and Rimini Street, the Rimini Street logo, and combinations thereof, and other marks marked by TM are trademarks of Rimini Street, Inc. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners, and unless otherwise specified, Rimini Street claims no affiliation, endorsement, or association with any such trademark holder or other companies referenced herein.

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¹ Nottinghamshire County Council population estimates, 2019: https://www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/business-community/economic-data/population-estimates

² Nottinghamshire County Council structure: https://www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/council-structure/the-councils-structure

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210121005210/en/

FAQ

What recent agreement did Rimini Street (RMNI) secure with Nottinghamshire County Council?

Rimini Street renewed its support agreement with Nottinghamshire County Council for SAP software.

How much has Nottinghamshire County Council saved since switching to Rimini Street?

NCC has achieved substantial savings in maintenance costs over the past three years.

What is the duration of the support agreement between Rimini Street and NCC?

The support agreement guarantees essential software support for a minimum of 15 years.

How has Rimini Street's support impacted NCC's staffing?

NCC reduced its accounts payable staff from 20 to 7 while maintaining a 96% invoice completion rate.

What key services does Rimini Street provide to NCC?

Rimini Street provides expert support for SAP ECC 6.0 and SAP Business Objects software.