Green Cargo Extends Support Agreement With Rimini Street for Its SAP Applications, Enabling Company to Focus on Agile IT Strategy

Swedish rail logistics company cites strategic partnership, ultra-responsive support and peace of mind as key reasons to extend support agreement



LAS VEGAS-Wednesday 23 September 2020 [ AETOS Wire ]

(BUSINESS WIRE)-- 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 Green Cargo, the Swedish state-owned rail logistics operator, has renewed and extended support and maintenance for its mission-critical SAP ECC 6.0 platform with Rimini Street. Green Cargo first switched to Rimini Street Support in 2017 and is continuing with the Company’s ultra-responsive high-quality support model to enable the organization to continue to focus on its transformation initiatives – including the adoption of an agile, low-code application strategy – confident in the knowledge that its core SAP applications will remain stable and reliable under Rimini Street Support.

Rimini Street Support Gives Green Cargo Confidence to Transform IT Infrastructure

Green Cargo is a government-owned organization transporting 22 million tons of freight every year and serving close to 300 locations in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark through its network, as well as linking to nearly 2,000 destinations in continental Europe. In 2019, a new leadership team took over at Green Cargo with the objective of returning the business to profitability and supported Sweden’s Environmental Sustainability Goals. A new chief information officer (CIO) joined the organization at this time and was given the task of developing an IT strategy that would build a foundation for modernizing the organization while mitigating major IT risks. The company set strategic objectives that by 2030, Green Cargo will increase the internal digitization of processes, automate its rail operations, and lead the integration of eco-friendly systems. Ultimately, the goal is to find new ways to accelerate technology, data, and innovation leadership to maintain its environmentally friendly competitive advantage and build a modern, open, and scalable platform architecture for the business.

Following the financial crash in 2008, Green Cargo had to take extensive cost-cutting measures and outsource its entire IT operation. By the end of 2019, it was clear this was having a significant impact on IT investment and was no longer sustainable as all of the IT systems that could be rationalized had been cut back as much as was feasible. The organization was left with two core systems, its mainframe and SAP environments, which were highly complex due to customizations that had been built up over time under different iterations of the IT strategy. The first strategic decision was to decide whether to migrate away from its core SAP environment and invest in a multi-year IT program to replace the existing system or find a new approach to meet the strategic needs of the business.

Low-Code Platforms More Quickly Drive Innovation

At the end of 2019, Green Cargo decided to remain with its existing core mainframe and SAP environments. Its SAP systems would continue to be supported by Rimini Street’s third-party support to give the company confidence its core business applications remained stable while it adopted a more evolutionary approach to innovation. IT sought to evolve the core infrastructure and instigate an evolutionary path to minimize disruption using a low-code approach to the design, testing, and development of new applications, which would integrate with the core infrastructure and operate in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment.

Rimini Street has now become one of five trusted strategic partners to Green Cargo as it looks to implement its agile, low-code IT model. Green Cargo felt Rimini Street could be depended on to help secure, stabilize, and improve its critical SAP platform for many years to come. In addition, as with all Rimini Street clients, Green Cargo can continue to run its current SAP system for a minimum of 15 years from the time that they switched to the Company. Rimini Street has helped Green Cargo reduce a massive backlog of business development and compliance activities that had built up when there was little investment in IT. It has been able to stabilize the core SAP system, which includes FI/CO, HR, payroll, supply chain management, business warehouse, customer relationship management, and process orchestration. One significant challenge has been data duplication across different systems due to highly fragmented business processes.

“Our ambition is to deliver an IT roadmap that is driven by business needs, avoiding huge investments and the risks of migrating to other platforms including the disruption to our business and the risk that the IT systems supporting our train network would go down,” said Ingo Paas, CIO, Green Cargo. “Knowing that we have Rimini Street as a trusted strategic partner, ensuring the stability of our core SAP system, means we have the confidence and capacity to focus on the execution and further development of our business goals. Rimini Street is solely focused on support and is incredibly customer-centric, which means it is constantly aiming to raise the bar and find new ways to deliver high-quality, cost-effective support to our business.”

Long-term, the IT team plans to change the endpoint for its services through greater integration with its customers’ business processes to increase transparency and demonstrate how its rail services are part of its customers’ core production processes. In the future, it expects to fully automate relationships with its customers using innovative products seamlessly integrated into their supply chains. The organization will continue to work with Rimini Street moving forward to find ways to improve its SAP platform. Together the companies have identified 24 specific initiatives to help improve the performance of their SAP system, such as modernizing its user interface so the application can be accessed on mobile devices.

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

“The strategic review Green Cargo has undertaken reflects the IT challenges facing many of our European customers today, and underlines that third-party support plays a strategic role for organizations transforming their approach to application development and deployment,” said Mark Armstrong, general manager, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, Rimini Street. “By removing the burden of managing its core SAP applications, Green Cargo can concentrate on building out its agile low-code strategy, which will help ensure the organization remains competitive into the future. Rimini Street provides far more than the 50% savings on a client’s annual support fees – we can play a strategic role in our clients’ long-term IT strategies, which will see them save up to 90% on total-cost-of-support. Also more importantly, we give our clients the peace of mind to concentrate on how IT will deliver value to the business.”

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. Over 2,100 Fortune 500, Fortune Global 100, midmarket, public sector and other organizations from a broad range of industries rely 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. All statements pertaining to Rimini Street’s expectations regarding the expected use of proceeds from the offering described in this press release constitute forward-looking statements. 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 economic, operational and financial impacts on Rimini Street’s business of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the actions taken by governmental authorities, clients or others in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; catastrophic events that disrupt Rimini Street’s business or that of its 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; Rimini Street’s need and ability to raise additional equity or debt financing on favorable terms and Rimini Street’s ability to generate cash flows from operations to help fund increased investment in Rimini Street’s growth initiatives; the sufficiency of Rimini Street’s cash and cash equivalents to meet its liquidity requirements; the terms and impact of Rimini Street’s 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 Rimini Street’s recently introduced products and services, including its 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 Rimini Street expects 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 risks discussed under the heading “Risk Factors” in Rimini Street’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed on August 5, 2020 and in the prospectus supplement dated August 14, 2020 relating to the underwritten public offering of Rimini Street’s common stock that closed on August 18, 2020 and as updated from time to time by 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.

© 2020 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200922005337/en/

Contacts

Michelle McGlocklin
Rimini Street, Inc.
+1 925 523-8414
mmcglocklin@riministreet.com

Permalink : https://www.aetoswire.com/news/green-cargo-extends-support-agreement-with-rimini-street-for-its-sap-applications-enabling-company-to-focus-on-agile-it-strategy/en