Rimini Street, a global provider of enterprise software support products and services, considers the Philippines as a key market with a good potential for growth despite the pandemic.
Andrew Seow, group vice president and regional general manager for Southeast Asia and Greater China at Rimini Street, says the Philippines is one of the company’s priority markets in Asia.
“Since the Philippines is also one of our key markets, we are looking forward to ramping up our operations in the country so we can help local enterprises unlock more savings through optimizing operations, leverage digitalization to help ensure their recovery, resiliency and growth amid uncertain changes in the business landscape,” Seow says in an email interview.
Rimini Street counts several manufacturing, logistics and distribution companies in the Philippines as customers. The company has been providing third-party enterprise software support services to over 4,400 organizations globally including Unilab, Mitsubishi, Yamaha, Hyundai, Kia Motors, Fortune 500 companies, and other organizations from a broad range of industries.
Rimini Street was founded in 2005 with the mission to help clients extract value from enterprise software, invest in innovation, create competitive advantage and enable growth. It now has over 1,595 employees in 27 offices worldwide.
Enterprise solutions
Among its support and managed service solutions for enterprise software are those of Oracle, SAP and Salesforce, giving customers a choice on how to support and manage their software and deliver a service experience, powered by experts, that is client centric.
“Our business model helps them get more value out of the software they have invested in, and with savings they get with Rimini Street, our clients are able to fund in innovation to drive growth,” Seow says.
Rimini Street began servicing companies in the Philippines in 2014. “There is a huge market opportunity in the Philippines for ERP software support as there are a total of 957,620 enterprises recorded in 2020, 99.51 percent or 952,969 of these are micro, small and medium enterprises and 4,651 or only 0.49 percent are large enterprises,” says Seow.
The World Bank reported that majority of organizations in the Philippines, including 58 percent of SMEs and large firms and 63 percent of micro firms, leveraged digital solutions to address the impact of COVID-19.
“Even prior to the pandemic, a lot of businesses in the Philippines have already started their digital transformation journey. A study by P&A Grant Thornton also found that digital transformation initiatives enabled business continuity amid COVID-19 as a majority of organizations in the Philippines implemented remote work arrangements,” he says.
Tool for recovery
Seow says technology plays a crucial role in enabling recovery for businesses and economies. “More enterprises and governments are leveraging technology and accelerating their digitalization, and it is expected to significantly increase in the coming years as more businesses and transactions shift towards digital amid sustained health and safety concerns due to the pandemic,” he says.
An Asian Development Bank report shows that accelerated digital transformation can potentially boost global output, trade and commerce and employment opportunities.
A CFO Peer Insights study sponsored by Rimini Street with Dimensional Research in 2021 that included 1,500 CFOs and senior financial leaders globally found that digital transformation investments are part of the top five spending priorities of 80 percent of corporations.
“Additionally, increased technology spending is driven by new digital transformation investments, with 71 percent of respondents saying that digital transformation is a crucial factor to their success,” he says.
“Technology investments are consistently an enabler for rapid change and ongoing flexibility. However, COVID-19 has significantly accelerated technology adoption to support new business-critical requirements, from remote work to virtual customer inter-actions to supply chain sourcing. The vast majority or 95 percent agree that technology investments are crucial to recovering from the business impacts of COVID-19,” says Seow.
Seow says that by leveraging Rimini Street’s third-party support, customers reported being able to save 50-percent on annual software support fees and up to 90 percent on total maintenance costs. These savings enable the customers to reallocate funds towards other innovation to further support their organization.
Future of work
Seow says the pandemic led to the rise of remote work and a lot of other changes due to health restrictions and mobility constraints. This compelled organizations to rethink how they conduct business and accelerate their digital transformation initiatives to support the shift in operations. “We expect this to continue into a hybrid workforce as employees prefer the flexibility remote work offers,” he says.
As vaccinations increase and cases continue to decrease, companies are preparing their workforce for a hybrid scenario, he says.
Companies are optimizing technology investments to prioritize tools that boost collaboration, productivity, business agility and resilience.
Cost efficiency
Rimini Street has gained a lot of traction in Southeast Asia as it provides software support to more clients in the region. “Our clients, who are composed of large enterprises now enjoy much better cost efficiency and customized support services than before. Because our customer base has also grown in the past few years, we have also ramped up our expansion into the region through hiring more talent to better provide highly personalized consultative services that would help drive competitive advantage and growth for organizations,” says Seow.