Rimini Street: SaaS-pocalypse spells opportunity to escape AI lock-in

The enterprise software support provider long known for challenging vendor lock-in is now applying the same disruptive philosophy to the AI era. That emerged from a chat with Rimini Street CFO Michael Perica on the sidelines of the Gartner Finance Symposium taking place in Sydney, who says the 'SaaS-pocalypse' is unfolding right now.

"That's what we're calling it," says Perica. "And in the presentation I'm giving here, that's probably my favourite slide."

Check out software share prices on the bourses, and you'll see what he's talking about in real time, up close and personal. Enterprise software valuations are under pressure, with big providers like Oracle (Rimini Street's bete noir, more below) shifting capital via debt, lots of it, toward hardware and cloud infrastructure to power their AI ambitions.

There's another side to it, which is that SaaS providers of off the shelf software are facing an existential crisis. Sneer at vibe coding all you want, but AI powered dev tools means businesses today looking for software that specifically meets their needs can simply develop it themselves.

"That's why we're targeting enterprise software, platform portfolios, and so on. Enterprise software was always a perpetual growth business, right? The assumption is that everyone's going to buy more of it because they won't have a choice, and [the vendors] have had success for a few decades off that," Perica says.

But AI means this is about to change. "No, it's not going to turn off overnight. You do have existing contracts, for example. But what the [stock] market is telling you, by adjusting evaluations, is that there are alternate paths, and they come from agentic AI. Those who innovate and create an agentic AI layer have a quicker, more economical path to modernisation."

The enterprise vendors are aware of the risk, and are looking to spend their way out of it with their own AI solutions. And that brings us back to the spend up on AI, which runs into hundreds of billions of dollars.

The trouble with debt, of course, is that it creates an obligation. And the dark side of vendor lock-in means those with the combination of debt and locked-in customers know where to look for the funds to service it.

Going back in history, Rimini Street was founded on a simple premise: customers should not be forced to pay vendor-mandated and ever-escalating maintenance fees or undertake costly upgrades simply to keep their systems running. Instead, Rimini Street offered third-party support for already-licensed, often fully depreciated Oracle databases and applications at a fraction of the cost, while guaranteeing continued security updates and fixes.

Sounds great for clients who may have seen vendor lock-in as a rent-seeking exercise. So great that Rimini Street quickly grew to an international business and eventually landed a listing on the Nasdaq (and to be fair, its own share price is showing signs of deterioration not unlike those of enterprise software vendors).

That context is important, because Rimini Street reckons it has an enhanced role to play as AI emerges and makes imminent the SaaS-pocalypse. Its answer in this new era is its 'Smart Path' methodology, resting on the same foundation of choice. Perica says Smart Path starts by recognising existing (often fully owned and depreciated systems), optimising and stabilising, then putting in an 'agentic AI' layer built with partners (like ServiceNow).

From there, use the preferred AI from any provider, rather than choosing the one mandated by the vendor that sold the enterprise software in the first place, and which it now insists has no value.

"It's the same principle that got us started," Perica says. "We gave clients an off-ramp from lock-in two decades ago; now we're giving them an off-ramp from AI lock-in."

He notes that with AI technology evolving rapidly, committing capital today to any one vendor offering risks being outdated within years. Or even months. "By keeping innovation outside and above your systems, you own it, you customise it, and you participate in the future improvements instead of waiting for the vendor to deliver them."