News Analysis: Rimini Street Says "No" to Tomorrow Now

April 9, 2008

Recent press releases from Rimini Street indicate that the third party maintenance provider will not pursue an acquisition of Tomorrow Now from SAP. A few reasons why an acquisition of Tomorrow Now might not make sense:

  • Why buy when they are coming for free? Many global and big named customers already have made the decision to migrate to Rimini Street. Money spent on an acquisition could be used to improve existing service offerings instead.
  • Top talent has moved on to SAP. Many of the best account managers and support engineers have transitioned over to SAP's Active Global Support (AGS) organization and no longer work within the TomorrowNow unit. Existing customers have expressed some frustration with the "skeleton" crew.
  • Tomorrow Now currently a money losing operation. With SAP losing and estimated $35M a year at the Tomorrow Now operations, only a provider with enough scale could stem the losses. In addition, the pending litigation from Oracle continues to put a damper on any potential acquisition.

The bottom line.
With Erwin Gunst at the helm as COO and his board mandate to cut costs and increase margins, its inevitable that a deal to unload Tomorrow Now will become a near term reality. However, the new buyer will have to stem the tide of customer defections to Rimini Street as well as find a way to keep Oracle off its backs. Despite such set backs, expect the pressure for third party maintenance options to increase as the recent maintenance price increases by SAP for new customers will only add to the mounting pressure for new options.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by R Wang. All rights reserved

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by R Wang. All rights reserved
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