Technology
Rimini Street Boosts Investment in Latin America
Rimini Street, Inc., the leading global independent provider of enterprise software support services for SAP SE’s Business Suite, BusinessObjects and HANA Database software and Oracle Corporation’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, Oracle Database, Oracle Middleware, Hyperion, Oracle Retail and Oracle Agile PLM software, has announced its continued strong growth trajectory and investment in the Latin American region due to fast-growing demand for Rimini Street’s premium-level ERP software support for Oracle and SAP licensees.
The Company announced that it has increased its total signed clients in Latin America by 189% year over year in the second quarter ending June 30, 2016, and that it has made numerous strategic hires in the region to meet demand in this fast-growing market. Rimini Street’s best in class support model is a welcome solution to organizations who are interested in growing, expanding and innovating their business in the region despite a difficult economic climate.
Rimini Street also announced that it has increased its recurring Oracle and SAP revenue in Latin America by 57%1 year over year in the second quarter ending June 30, 2016. Today, Rimini Street supports more than 100 global clients with operations in Latin America including well-known local Brazilian companies Atento, Embraer S.A., GRSA, Grupo Rodobens, Infoglobo, MRS Logística S.A. and Tecnisa S.A.
To meet fast-growing demand in the region, Rimini Street has increased its local investment by adding several local senior executives and staff, including highly experienced delivery and support engineers. During the 12 month period ending in June 30, 2016, Rimini Street’s headcount in the region grew 229% year over year compared to the prior 12 month period.
The Latin American economy continues to struggle in 2016 with lower global demand for exports such as oil and gas, mining, and agriculture impacting the entire region. This has had a ripple effect in all areas of business including IT infrastructure costs, with many companies citing a 20 – 30% decrease in their overall IT budgets for 2016. In 2017, this budget line item is expected to decrease another 15%. With these substantial budget challenges, many organizations only have budget to sustain their current IT infrastructure, with insufficient budget left over to fund strategic initiatives.
In Brazil specifically, the country is navigating its worst recession in 25 years. Rimini Street’s unique value proposition – the combination of unsurpassed quality support coupled with substantial savings on annual support costs – has addressed a real economic need. In addition to saving clients up to 90% on their support and maintenance costs, clients are able to run their current software release for a minimum of 15 years, avoiding expensive and unnecessary upgrades to their stable ERP system.
“Brazil’s economy is expected to shrink a further 3.5% this year and organizations are struggling to stay viable in this contracting market, actively seeking solutions for cost reduction while maintaining their competitive edge,” said Edenize Maron, general manager, Rimini Street Latin America. “With a 189% increase in our signed Oracle and SAP clients, it is clear that Rimini Street’s offering is an enormous benefit to Oracle and SAP software licensees in this challenging market – we are helping CIOs realign their IT budgets and unlock extra funds that can be reinvested back into their business. Furthermore, we are aggressively hiring and investing in the best, most experienced on-boarding, support, and delivery talent in our industry to help ensure our client’s success with their switch to Rimini Street independent support.”
Clients in the region who recently made the switch to Rimini Street support include leading Brazil media group Infoglobo.
Infoglobo moved the support of its SAP R/3 4.7 system to Rimini Street in November 2015, and then transitioned to SAP ECC 6.0 while under Rimini Street support. As experienced by all clients who switch to Rimini Street, Infoglobo realized immediate savings that the company can reallocate to more strategic areas of its business.
“Infoglobo has great expectations for our new partnership with Rimini Street. Rimini Street is delivering a more flexible, premium quality service with faster response times, and we get a personalized service approach from our primary support engineer,” said Alexandre Donner, CIO, Infoglobo.
“We are excited to explore new IT investment options now made possible through the significant savings we achieved by switching to Rimini Street support – this includes looking into updating our vast digital infrastructure.”
Atento, the largest provider of customer relationship management and business process outsourcing services in Latin America and Spain, engaged Rimini Street support for its SAP ECC 6.0 platform.
“Atento achieved its leadership position through a dedicated focus on providing superior client service and having a highly engaged employee base, and our SAP system is a critical component of our business operations across 14 countries. However, we did not see the business benefit of an expensive re-platforming to SAP S/4HANA, and wanted to implement a support strategy that would allow Atento to reliably run our current ECC 6.0 system for a minimum of 15 years. We selected a support partner in Rimini Street who could help us maximize our current SAP investment, and at the same time allow us to free up funds to put back into client service initiatives where it really counts,” said Rogerio Ribeiro, CIO, Atento.
Rimini Street Support for Dynamic, Complex Latin American Tax and Regulatory Laws
Licensees in Latin America must manage dynamic, complex tax and regulatory laws that are difficult for both global and local organizations to comply with and keep current with updates to their systems. The process is labour intensive and complex, often requiring thousands of labor hours. In fact, according to the World Bank, corporate tax compliance in Brazil is 14 times lengthier in process than the United States, and longer than any other country in the world2.
In Brazil, Rimini Street provides critical ongoing support for evolving trade and tax regulation under the Sistema Público de Escrituração Digital (SPED) and legal books/taxation compliance – all at no additional cost to clients. Rimini Street has delivered to its clients all complex SPED updates including Nota Fiscal Eletrônica (NFe), Digital Accounting Bookkeeping (ECD), Digital Tax Booking (EFD), Accounting Tax Booking (ECF), Notas Técnicas, Social Security Contributions, SPED Social HR (eSOCIAL), EFD Block-K and EFD Reinf.
To ensure timely and accurate updates, Rimini Street’s dedicated team works directly with government organizations and thousands of additional sources in a patent-pending process to identify, analyze and deliver update capabilities for nearly 200 countries. Globally, the Company has delivered more than 115,000 updates to date, provided by a range of support, development and tax, legal and regulatory (TLR) research professionals in the market.
In addition to delivering the most comprehensive, timely TLR updates to clients around the world, each client is assigned a named, Primary Support Engineer (PSE), and benefits from ultra-responsive 24x7x365 support with response times of 15 minutes or less for Priority 1 cases. Clients also receive support for their own system add-ons and customizations, which are all provided at no additional cost as part of Rimini Street’s global award-winning support. The Company’s superior service model and seasoned engineers have won numerous awards for delivering excellence in customer service.
By Dipo Olowookere
The Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for MTN Nigeria, Mr Babalola Oyeleye, has disclosed that the telecommunications company intends to expand its infrastructure to give its customers quality service.
The demand for connectivity in Nigeria is growing, and with a new forecast predicting the Internet of Things (IoT) market to reach $38.7 billion by 2030, stakeholders, especially operators, are already positioning themselves to dominate the space
Government and private sector investments in digital transformation have created an ecosystem that includes system integrators and security specialists. Industries such as utilities and agriculture are leading the charge, adopting IoT to solve localised problems like power theft and low crop yields.
Currently, 4G coverage has reached approximately 80 per cent of Nigeria’s population, with 5G services already in major cities like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Kano. This connectivity backbone is essential for the low-latency communication required by millions of connected devices.
“Reaching the $38.7 billion mark isn’t just about the numbers; it’s about the millions of data points helping Nigerian SMEs and large corporations make smarter decisions every day. Our goal is to ensure the connectivity is there to meet this soaring demand,” Mr Oyeleye noted.
As the ecosystem matures, the focus is shifting toward all-in-one solutions that simplify the user experience. With ongoing investments in NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT) and other low-power connectivity options, the next five years are set to see an explosion in smart city and smart home applications across the country.
By Adedapo Adesanya
South African-founded Refiant AI has raised $5 million to slash the energy footprint of artificial intelligence (AI) in a seed round led by VoLo Earth Ventures, a top climate technology fund.
The startup uses nature-inspired algorithms to radically compress AI models, slashing the hardware and energy required to run them. The new fund will be used to scale Refiant’s team – which already includes a former Google Cloud architect, a Cambridge PhD researcher, and an engineer with NASA experience – to build out a platform and to accelerate enterprise partnerships.
According to a statement shared with Business Post, the company is in active conversations with several multinational technology firms exploring how Refiant’s approach could reduce their AI compute costs while maintaining data and energy sovereignty.
“AI’s growing energy footprint is one of the most urgent and underappreciated challenges in the climate space,” said Mr Sid Gutta, the company’s co-founder. “The industry’s default answer is to build more data centres and consume more power. Ours is to make the AI itself dramatically more efficient.”
The company said it has already successfully demonstrated it can compress a 120 billion parameter AI model to run on a standard laptop, reducing energy requirements by over 80 per cent while preserving near-identical quality. It achieved this to run on a MacBook Pro with just 12GB of RAM. The same model would normally require hardware with at least 80GB of memory. The model retained 95-99 per cent of its fidelity, ran alongside a second AI model on the same machine, and the entire process took four hours with no cloud computing required.
For Refiant, its approach will help businesses reduce their carbon footprint and adopt AI to stay competitive. The energy required to process a single AI prompt on standard infrastructure could power roughly 100 equivalent prompts using Refiant’s approach.
The current breakthrough results were attained at the end of last year, and since then, the team have been gearing up to demonstrate successfully exceeding these results with further compression, longer context windows and model traceability.
“The AI industry is spending hundreds of billions scaling infrastructure when the real breakthrough is the ability to do more with radically less,” said Mr Viroshan Naicker, co-Founder and a mathematician with published research in networks and quantum systems. “Nature doesn’t build by brute force. Evolution optimises. We’ve applied that principle to AI – and the results speak for themselves.”
“AI’s biggest constraint isn’t demand – it’s energy,” added Mr Joseph Goodman, Managing Partner, VoLo Earth. “What’s been missing is a fundamentally more efficient way to compute. Refiant’s architecture replaces brute-force scaling with a far more efficient, nature-inspired approach that lowers energy use while increasing capability. That’s the kind of breakthrough needed to make AI sustainable on a global scale.”
By Adedapo Adesanya
Google and UpSkill Universe, Sub-Saharan Africa’s leading AI and business skills training partner, have announced a major redesign of the Google Hustle Academy programme. For the first time, the free training initiative is open to everyone, not just business owners.
The new curriculum is focused on equipping individuals and entrepreneurs with practical AI skills and comes at a time when small businesses have become the engine of Africa’s economy, creating over 80 per cent of jobs on the continent. To help them grow, the Hustle Academy was launched in 2022, providing bootcamp-style training on business strategy, digital skills, AI, and leadership. The program has since trained over 18,000 SMEs, with many reporting increased revenue and job creation.
Now, as AI reshapes the job market, the program is evolving. The 2026 edition is built for anyone in Sub-Saharan Africa, including employees, students, and job seekers, who want to use AI to advance their careers. To meet the needs of a diverse audience, the new format includes short, 60-minute webinars and more immersive, high-impact bootcamps. These sessions are laser-focused on putting AI to work immediately in areas like digital commerce, marketing, and growth strategy.
Speaking about the academy, Mr Gori Yahaya, Founder & CEO of UpSkill Universe, said, “The 2026 Hustle Academy is designed to close the AI Skills gap with hands-on training that is short, focused, and immediately useful. AI is reshaping how businesses win and how careers are built, right across this continent. We’re excited to renew our partnership, now in its fifth year with Google, combining their global AI leadership with our deep regional AI expertise. The next wave of AI leaders will come from this continent. We are making sure they are ready.”
The Hustle Academy initiative has strengthened digital competitiveness across emerging African economies by enabling SMEs to move beyond AI awareness to practical implementation, positioning them for sustained growth in an increasingly AI-driven business environment.
“We believe that the future of Africa’s digital economy lies in the hands of individuals and entrepreneurs alike. Our new strategy focuses on scaling reach by training individuals in the latest AI-centred tools and techniques,” said a Google representative.
Applications for the 2026 cohort are now open. Interested participants can apply at: https://rsvp.withgoogle.com/events/hustle-academy
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