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Rimini Street Boosts Investment in Latin America

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rimini street

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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Modded Hosting With Reliable Backups: Biome Types Guide

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Modded Hosting

Modded Minecraft worlds take weeks to build. Custom biomes, terraformed landscapes, established bases — losing any of it to a corrupted chunk or a failed update is devastating. Backups aren’t optional for modded servers. They’re essential.

Modded hosting with reliable backups protects everything players have built across every minecraft biome types the pack introduces — without requiring manual backup routines that nobody remembers to run.

Why Modded Worlds Are More Vulnerable to Data Loss

Vanilla Minecraft worlds are relatively stable. Modded worlds have more ways to break. Mod updates can corrupt chunk data if block IDs change. Crashes during chunk generation leave partial files. Automated farms that run while no players are online can cause chunk-level issues over time.

Biomes added by mods require extra care. Changing biome mods later can cause unexpected problems. If the old biome data no longer exists, Minecraft may not know how to read parts of the world anymore. The Minecraft Wiki explains that every generated chunk keeps its own biome information in the save. Modded biomes require their mod to be present to load correctly — removing the mod without migrating chunks first causes permanent data loss in those areas.

Minecraft Biome Types: What Mods Add

People often focus on giant mountains or rare structures, but smaller biome changes matter too. A carefully designed minecraft grass biome can completely change the appearance of an entire region. Once that combines with improved forests, rivers, and mountain generation, exploration naturally takes longer because there’s almost always another interesting place nearby. There’s a massive difference once biome mods are installed. Biomes O’ Plenty alone adds over 80 biomes. Terralith adds another 95 plus, although it still builds worlds using Minecraft’s regular generation system rather than a custom one. Oh The Biomes You’ll Go adds tropical and fantasy biomes not found in either.

Each of these creates a richer world to explore — and more unique terrain to protect. A player who spends two sessions exploring and settling in a modded cherry blossom grove loses something irreplaceable if that chunk gets corrupted without a backup.

Content creator and modpack player Noxite has described modded biome exploration as one of the most memorable experiences in the game — “every new biome feels like discovering a location that exists only in your world.” Backups protect that discovery.

Many players only start thinking about backups after something goes wrong. It’s surprisingly easy for a modded world to develop problems. Maybe the server restarts halfway through chunk generation, or a mod update changes world data in a way the old save no longer understands. Even experienced server owners don’t get through every update without issues. Sometimes everything looks fine until someone explores a new biome and discovers broken chunks. At that point, having a recent backup is usually the simplest solution instead of trying to repair damaged terrain piece by piece.

What a Reliable Backup System Looks Like for Modded Servers

For modded worlds, backup requirements go beyond vanilla minimums:

  1. Daily automated backups — at minimum; hourly for active community servers
  2. Full world backups — not just player data; entire world folder including all dimensions
  3. Pre-update snapshots — automatic backup triggered before any mod or server update
  4. Offsite storage — backups stored separately from the server to survive hardware failure
  5. Easy restoration — one-click restore to a specific backup without technical support

Biome backup

Protecting Every Biome You’ve Explored

Minecraft biomes wiki entries for modded biomes often include notes about save compatibility across versions. The community’s experience is consistent: mod updates break worlds more often than player actions do. Regular backups are the only reliable protection.

Choose modded hosting with reliable backups that runs automatically, stores multiple restore points, and makes restoration simple. The time investment in setting up proper backups is always less than the time lost rebuilding after a preventable data loss event.

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5 Ways AI is Transforming Consumer Intelligence and Analytics

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AI consumer analytics

The rules have changed. How companies actually know their customers — really know them — looks almost nothing like it did ten years ago. Old-school research methods are drowning. Too slow, too narrow, too dependent on humans manually stitching together datasets that have already gone cold. Markets shift in days now, not quarters. And the cost of a slow read on consumer behavior keeps climbing. This isn’t just a tooling upgrade. The underlying logic of how businesses decide what to build, what to charge, and who to reach has been gutted and rebuilt from scratch. Staying reactive isn’t a strategy anymore. It’s a liability.

1. Real-Time Data Processing and Pattern Recognition

Consumer intelligence used to run on stale numbers. Analysts dug into data weeks — sometimes months — after whatever actually happened. Modern AI kills that lag. Entirely. These systems chew through enormous volumes of behavioral data on the fly, surfacing patterns that human teams couldn’t find in the same timeframe with ten times the headcount. Machine learning algorithms can process millions of customer interactions, transactions, and behavioral signals simultaneously — pulling clean signal out of what would otherwise be undifferentiated noise. A retailer can track sentiment across social media, reviews, and support tickets right now, catching a brewing problem or an emerging trend in hours rather than weeks. Inventory shifts, pricing moves, message pivots — all of it happens before a trend fully crystallizes. That’s a different game entirely.

2. Predictive Analytics and Consumer Behavior Forecasting

Here’s what actually changed: AI stops consumer intelligence from being a backward-looking exercise. Instead of cataloguing what customers already did, companies can now forecast what they’re likely to do next — and with striking accuracy. Advanced ML models thread together historical patterns and live behavioral signals to predict churn, flag high-value prospects, and project demand across entire product lines. A telecom company can spot which customers are quietly drifting toward a competitor before they ever make the switch — and intervene first. That’s not a marginal improvement. It’s a fundamentally different posture. Resources flow toward the segments that actually matter, rather than spreading thin across the whole base and hoping something sticks.

3. Personalization at Scale

Consumers expect personalized experiences. Full stop. Meeting that expectation at scale — for millions of people at once — is simply beyond what human analysts and traditional segmentation can deliver. Machine learning models read individual purchase histories, browsing patterns, preferences, and demographic signals to build dynamic profiles that drive product recommendations, custom messaging, and tailored interfaces. When building and refining these individualized profiles, marketers who need to enrich their first-party data with verified behavioral signals rely on audience data providers to ensure their models are trained on accurate, high-quality consumer information. An e-commerce platform can serve each visitor a genuinely different experience — different layouts, different offers, different content — all built around that visitor’s unique fingerprint. Conversion lifts. Lifetime value climbs. People respond when recommendations actually fit their lives, not just the average of everyone else’s.

4. Sentiment Analysis and Brand Perception Monitoring

Knowing how consumers feel about a brand means wading through unstructured mess. Reviews, comment threads, support tickets, social posts, video captions — none of it parses cleanly by hand at any useful speed. Natural language processing handles it. NLP systems automatically scan text-based content across digital channels, classifying sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral while bucketing feedback by topic, product feature, or customer segment. An automaker can track online conversations about a specific reliability concern and catch it before it snowballs into a full-blown reputation crisis. No waiting for quarterly surveys. No lag. Brand perception monitoring becomes continuous — and decisions about product fixes, messaging shifts, or service interventions get grounded in real signal rather than gut instinct.

5. Competitive Intelligence and Market Positioning Analysis

Competitive intelligence used to mean manual tracking, sprawling spreadsheets, and perpetually incomplete pictures. AI automates the entire collection-and-analysis loop. ML models watch competitor pricing moves, product launches, promotions, and messaging shifts across digital channels — then stack that data against a company’s own position. Gaps surface. Threats register earlier. A financial services firm can monitor exactly which themes competitors are pushing on social media and which ones are actually generating engagement — then sharpen their own positioning accordingly. Real-time visibility into competitive dynamics means strategic calls about where to invest, which markets to enter, and how to stand apart in crowded categories aren’t made blind anymore.

Conclusion

What AI has done to consumer intelligence isn’t incremental. It’s structural. Real-time processing of massive datasets. Forecasting future behavior instead of autopsying the past. Personalization that reaches millions, not hundreds. Continuous sentiment monitoring. Automated competitive tracking. None of these were realistic options a decade ago. They are now. Companies that wire these capabilities into their core operations make faster, sharper decisions — ones that show up directly in revenue, satisfaction scores, and market share. Those that don’t will keep falling further behind. And the gap between organizations that wield these tools well and those still grinding through traditional approaches? It’s not closing. It’s widening every quarter.

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Redtech Broadens West African Presence, Earns Global Fintech Recognition

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Redtech

By Adedapo Adesanya

Redtech, a financial technology company backed by Mr Tony Elumelu’s Heirs Holdings, has intensified its pan-African expansion strategy as it extends its payment infrastructure beyond Nigeria and leverages recent global recognition to strengthen its footprint across the continent.

The fintech firm was named in the payments category of the World’s Top Fintech Companies 2026 ranking by CNBC and Statista. It is among the only 11 African companies recognised in this year’s edition.

Developed by CNBC and Statista, the annual ranking identifies 500 leading fintech companies from a pool of more than 3,500 businesses worldwide. Serving as a data-driven benchmark, the ranking highlights companies shaping the future of financial services through technology, innovation and scalable digital solutions.

The company said it is accelerating its push into new African markets with the rollout of digital banking and payment solutions.

As part of this expansion, the UBA RedPay mobile application is now operational in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and Senegal, marking the company’s first significant digital banking presence outside Nigeria.

It has also introduced virtual account services in Ghana through a partnership with UBA, broadening its payment collection capabilities in West Africa.

The company said the move aligns with its long-term ambition to build a unified payment infrastructure that enables businesses to collect, process, reconcile, disburse and manage funds seamlessly across African markets.

Commenting on the company’s growth strategy, the chief executive of Redtech, Mr Emmanuel Ojo, said Africa’s increasingly interconnected digital economy requires payment infrastructure that can support cross-border commerce.

“Recognition from CNBC and Statista reflects the growing relevance of African Fintech companies on the global stage and validates our ambition to build Redtech into Africa’s payment infrastructure company.

“We are building the technology that enables businesses of every size to collect, pay and manage money seamlessly across channels and markets. As African commerce becomes increasingly digitally connected across multiple market borders, businesses need payment infrastructure that is reliable, secure, interoperable and designed for the realities of operating across the continent.

“Our goal is to help power that growth by making payments simpler and more connected for African businesses, while building solutions that reflect global standards.”

Redtech continues to scale its operations, with available numbers showing that the fintech has processed approximately N45.84 trillion ($33.21 billion) in transaction value through its flagship RedPay platform and deployed more than 55,000 point-of-sale terminals serving merchants across sectors including banking, fintech, retail, hospitality, energy and utilities.

Looking ahead, the company said it plans to expand its collections and financial infrastructure capabilities across all 54 African countries, enabling businesses and financial institutions to manage transactions across multiple markets through a single technology platform.

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