Rimini Street plans 1,000-engineer Malaysia hub as Southeast Asia demand grows

Rimini Street plans to build a global capability center (GCC) in Malaysia, with a long-term ambition of having around 1,000 engineers at this hub.

Seth Ravin, CEO of Rimini Street, was in Southeast Asia recently to catch up with partners and customers in the region and also make a strategic growth announcement in the region. Rimini Street plans to build a global capability center (GCC) in Malaysia. The company has outlined a long‑term ambition to grow this hub to around 1,000 engineers over time.

Rimini Street currently employs about 45 people in Malaysia, including around 30 engineers already hired locally as part of the GCC build-out. Apart from Malaysia, Rimini Street also has presence in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines with Singapore being a key market as well.

With plans for a new GCC and to hire about 1,000 engineers in Malaysia, Ravin shared that Rimini Street is received very well in the Southeast Asian region, with about 50% of the projects the company working on in the region part of a methodical approach.

“We're doing them in Indonesia and Malaysia. So, we're seeing it and they're doing really great things with it. But we're doing it in the methodical way whereby we're actually solving process issues first, then automating, then coming into AI. So we're teaching them to follow the methodology. We're taking down their costs by moving their maintenance to Rimini Street,” Ravin said.

He explained that his cuts their annual fees by half and since most customers in the region do not have to upgrade and migrations, they save a lot of money which can be applied to pay for new technology.

“And what they love about this is they don’t have to go to the board for additional money. Nobody wants to do that. That's a career limiting move right now. So, the fact that they can do it all within their existing budget is what they love. And we're doing that all over the region. I think that's definitely the biggest push. Because when you are able to not break the bank and you don't have to increase your budget, and work with what you have. This is definitely what businesses want. You're still getting the same capabilities,” Ravin explained.

This is also why he believes Rimini Street is in a unique position as they actually helped customers to lower the cost of maintenance.

Customers want options

One customer that recently selected Rimini Street to help maintain business continuity, strengthen support for its critical SAP ECC environment and free internal IT resources to focus on digital transformation initiatives is Indonesia’s VIVERE Group.

Faced with the end of support for its ECC system and a push to migrate to S/4HANA, VIVERE sought the advice of Gartner on roadmap options. Based on the conversations and peer recommendations, VIVERE determined that its investments would be best allocated to innovation rather than a costly, time-consuming upgrade to S/4HANA.

As such, the Indonesia-based integrated interior and furnishing solutions provider selected Rimini Street as its strategic partner, benefitting from immediate cost savings, expert SAP support and the ability to modernize on top of its existing systems.

Another longtime customer is AUTOBACS SEVEN. As Japan’s leading automotive aftermarket retailer and service provider, AUTOBACS SEVEN operates approximately 1,300 stores in Japan and 150 stores overseas.

Over the past decade, the company has trusted Rimini Street to support its core systems as it has expanded its footprint and advanced digital services to enhance customer experience. This includes an expanded partnership to include support for Oracle Database, giving the company a single, trusted provider with deep expertise across both SAP and Oracle environments.

“So, we have a lot of customers across Southeast Asia and Greater China. Basically, they move their software maintenance to us. And then they redirect those savings into innovation that they can work on. They don't have to go to the board and ask for more money. Because it's self-sufficient and in that sense, self-funding,” Ravin said.

Breaking AI down for customers

While the focus is primarily on ERP solutions, Ravin also pointed out that Rimini Street works across everything, including sales.

“We moved AI into a catalogue of solutions and its so important because people are visual. They want to understand how to pick something and buy it,” Ravin said, showing CRN Asia a catalogue of how Rimini Street bundles its offerings for customers in the region.

“Executives that are not technical are not going to understand what you're talking about. But if you can present it like this, then I think, yeah, now we can talk about this is a real business problem they had. What is the problem? What is the solution? And if we get back to the basics on that and stop running around with AI, that's why all these projects are failing. Because they're starting at the end, not at the beginning.”

“You can't put AI on a bad process. That is not a good thing to do. That's not the best practice. It's like people who go out and copy into their system bad processes. We got to make sure this follows our process. So, I think bringing the discipline, bringing what we call that smart path, and stopping customers doing things that don't achieve those three goals,” he said.

Looking at the opportunity for partners in the region, Ravin said that while Rimini Street does work with some of the hyperscalers, the company is also looking at some of the hardware players and that they are still very young in the partner market.

“We've always done a lot of our own work, but we're growing very now in the region. We need more partners because most of them are suppliers of labor because we have ourselves. We announced that in KL we're putting 1,000 engineers there. So, we already have over 800 people in Hyderabad, India, and we have hundreds in Sao Paulo, Brazil. And so, this will complete our Southeast Asia core. And then we have people in 23 different countries. But we had to stock up to put people in with language.”

“We're making sure we serve all local languages, which is really appreciated. It's not easy for people to try and articulate complex technical items in English. We're making sure we're meeting our customers where they are,” he concluded.