Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Here We Go Again

Gosh, this feels awfully familiar. I haven't blogged here for over a year, and now it is on the same topic as my last post. Oracle has filed suit against Rimini Street, a third party provider of maintenance for a line of Oracle products (among them J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft). The suit, filed in California, is filled with allegations that look very similar to those in the suit Oracle filed against SAP / TomorrowNow. It alleges "massive" intellectual property theft by Rimini Street employees, who supposedly use valid Oracle customer IDs and passwords to download more information than the customers are allowed. Oracle has also asked for a preliminary injunction that would prohibit Rimini Street from doing pretty much anything having to do with Oracle code. That will essentially put the firm out of business and strand its customers.

The organization I work for is such a customer, and we have been very pleased with the support from Rimini Street. It certainly beats the support we received from PeopleSoft and Oracle. Rimini Street is much more responsive; we typically get responses within hours - not days. Oracle's suit states that Rimini Street can't be providing the same level of support as Oracle - it has nowhere near the resources. That is true, as far as it goes. But guess what - WE DON'T WANT OR NEED THAT LEVEL OF SUPPORT! All we want is to keep our "frozen" level of software running and to supply us with required tax and legal updates. Upgrading every one or two years cost us about $500,000 per upgrade, and we were not taking advantage of the new functionality anyway. Further, most of the maintenance fee goes to new product development, providing features we have no interest in using. The model that the major software firms use may be good for them; it is not necessarily good for all their customers.

Rimini Street indicates that it will "vigorously defend" the lawsuit. See an article in ComputerWorld commenting on the suit here, and an interesting blogger's view here.

While I sincerely hope the suit goes nowhere, we are beginning to look for alternative providers as a fallback. This is NOT something we wanted to get into again after moving over from TomorrowNow. As I said, we're pretty happy with Rimini Street and feel it is a good value.

One more thing - the complaint alleges that Rimini Street downloaded more information that was allowed to the customer whose ID / password was used. This was the same complaint Oracle made against TomorrowNow. Wouldn't you think a company with the resources of Oracle would have figured out a way to plug that hole after it was exploited the first time? I'm not condoning Rimini Street's behavior if it did what Oracle alleges, but this still makes me wonder.

More updates to come as this proceeds. You can be sure I'll be watching closely.