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Rimini Street Boosts Investment in Latin America

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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.

Dipo Olowookere is a journalist based in Nigeria that has passion for reporting business news stories. At his leisure time, he watches football and supports 3SC of Ibadan. Mr Olowookere can be reached via [email protected]

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Meta Launches AI Support Assistant on Facebook, Instagram

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Meta AI Support Assistant

By Aduragbemi Omiyale

New Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools designed to provide support for users of its applications have been launched by Meta.

The AI Support Assistant will work on the Facebook and Instagram apps, the company said in a statement.

The tools will help users to receive reliable and action-oriented assistance when needed.

In December, the Meta AI support assistant, a tool designed to provide reliable, 24/7 support for nearly any support issue at any time, was previewed.

Now, Meta is rolling it out globally on the Facebook and Instagram apps for iOS and Android, and within Help Centre on Facebook and Instagram on desktop, with even more capabilities and ways to help.

The new Meta AI support assistant is designed to help resolve account problems from start to finish. It offers answers for any question, like notification settings or new features, and can also take action for users on a growing set of requests directly within Facebook and, in the future, on Instagram.

The feature can report scams, impersonation accounts, or problematic content, make it easier to see why content was taken down, provide appeal options, track what happens next, manage privacy settings, reset passwords, and update profile settings.

The Meta AI support assistant can respond to requests typically in under five seconds, dramatically reducing wait times compared to traditional help centre searches or seeking answers on external websites.

“The Meta AI support assistant is a major step in our work to deliver stronger support on our apps. In fact, among people who have provided feedback, the majority report a positive experience with the Meta AI support assistant. It’s rolling out now in all languages supported by Facebook and Instagram for support topics.

“We’re continuing to invest in AI- powered tools to make support more accessible, reliable, and effective — and we’ll keep evolving the Meta AI support assistant as more people use it and as the technology advances, so it continues to improve over time,” the organisation disclosed.

Meta has also deployed AI to improve content enforcement to help users reduce the chance that scammers trick people into giving away their login details, ultimately finding and mitigating 5,000 scam attempts per day that no existing review team had caught before.

Meta said over the next few years, it would be deploying these more advanced AI systems across its apps once they consistently perform better than its current methods of content enforcement, transforming its approach.

“As we do this, we’ll reduce our reliance on third-party vendors for content enforcement and focus on strengthening our internal systems and workforce.

“While we’ll still have people who review content, these systems will be able to take on work that’s better-suited to technology, like repetitive reviews of graphic content or areas where adversarial actors are constantly changing their tactics, such as with illicit drug sales or scams,” it stated.

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Facebook Offers New Tools to Report Impersonation, Removes 20 million Accounts

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Facebook Original content creators

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

As part of its commitment to celebrating and rewarding creativity, Facebook has updated its guidance, with clear definitions of what counts as original and unoriginal content.

In a message on Monday, the social media platform said it was offering content creators new tools to report impersonation.

Launched last year, the content protection tool is expanding beyond detecting reel matches across Meta platforms to now also flag potential impersonation.

Creators can take action on content theft and easily submit impersonation reports all in one place.

Facebook, in the statement received by Business Post, said creators can check for access to content protection in their professional dashboard or apply for access here.

The platform also disclosed that in 2025, it removed over 20 million accounts impersonating large content creators, and impersonation reports related to large content creators dropped by 33 per cent.

Further, Facebook is deprioritising unoriginal content by making sure they do not perform well on its platform.

It noted that content that is duplicated from other sources or makes low-value changes to someone else’s content may see significantly reduced reach, and accounts that primarily post unoriginal content may lose eligibility for recommendations and monetisation.

It was emphasised that “these changes provide creators who post original content with greater reach and monetisation opportunities, provide stronger protections for their work, and reduce the reach of unoriginal content.”

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Genetec Sets New Standard for Enterprise Physical Security with Cloudlink 2210

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Genetec Cloudlink 2210

By Dipo Olowookere

A new high-density appliance that enables enterprises to scale cloud-managed physical security without forcing cloud-only storage or infrastructure replacement has been launched by a global leader in enterprise physical security software, Genetec.

The product, Cloudlink 2210, was designed for complex, enterprise-scale deployments and supports multiple workloads, including video management, access control, and intrusion detection, in a single appliance. By consolidating these workloads into one appliance, it reduces system sprawl, simplifies management in large-scale environments, and lowers operational overhead.

Unlike solutions that separate workloads across multiple proprietary systems, Genetec Cloudlink 2210 is built on an open architecture that supports a wide range of third-party devices, including cameras, access control systems, and intrusion panels. This enables organisations to modernise at scale within a unified, cloud-managed model designed to preserve architectural flexibility, while securely integrating existing hardware, maintaining business continuity, and reducing migration risks.

The company disclosed that Cloudlink 2210 also supports hundreds of connected devices per appliance and provides up to 240 TB of local storage per unit, making it well-suited for deployments with high device density and long retention policies. The Cloudlink 2210 is ideal for enterprise environments where uptime and local retention requirements are operational priorities because its design minimises dependence on cloud storage, helping organisations control long-term storage costs while maintaining the performance and availability required in enterprise environments.

The new product also incorporates hardware-level resiliency to support strict uptime and retention requirements. RAID-protected storage and redundant system components help ensure data protection and OS availability. Security workloads continue operating locally, independent of cloud connectivity, allowing deployments to maintain continuity even during network disruptions. Dual network interfaces provide redundancy and support network isolation to strengthen cybersecurity.

It scales by adding units as requirements grow, enabling organisations to increase device counts and storage capacity without redesigning their infrastructure. Centralised cloud management maintains visibility and control across deployments.

Genetec Cloudlink 2210 is part of the broader Genetec approach to deployment flexibility.  The cloud-managed appliance portfolio enables organisations to operate on premises, in the cloud, or across hybrid environments based on their operational and regulatory requirements. By combining high-performance local processing and storage with centralised cloud operations and management, Cloudlink 2210 supports scalable, cloud-managed deployments without compromising control or performance.

The Product Director for Unified Solutions at Genetec Incorporated, Mr Christian Chenard Lemire, said, “Enterprises don’t want to choose between innovation and operational certainty.

“With Cloudlink 2210, we’re redefining what cloud-managed physical security looks like at scale by giving organisations the freedom to modernise on their own terms, control long-term costs, and maintain the resiliency and continuity their most critical environments demand.”

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