In this episode of Builders Wanted, we’re joined by Eric Helmer, Chief Technology Officer at Rimini Street. Eric shares his insights on how to modernize mission-critical systems without compromising performance. Learn about the misconceptions about tech modernization, the importance of agility and flexibility in tech stacks, and the shift from reactive to proactive IT roles.
In this episode of Builders Wanted, we’re joined by Eric Helmer, Chief Technology Officer at Rimini Street. Eric shares his insights on how to modernize mission-critical systems without compromising performance. Learn about the misconceptions about tech modernization, the importance of agility and flexibility in tech stacks, and the shift from reactive to proactive IT roles.
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Key Takeaways:
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“ When you show organizations that you genuinely want to help them by showing them all the different options that they have in an agnostic way, it's a really best way to build fantastic relationships and keep that engagement simple and strategic. You have to figure out where you're going to spend your budgets. You have to take the emotion out of it. You gotta take tradition out of it and boil it down to data points that create obvious best choices.” – Eric Helmer
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:08) - How Eric defines his mission as a builder
*(06:12) - One major shift in how IT leaders approach long-term transformation
*(13:49) - How Eric keeps customer engagement simple and strategic
*(22:05) - A recent transformation Eric is proud of
*(28:19) - A low-profile change that made a surprising difference
*(36:27) - One thing every CIO should start or stop doing
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Links:
Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn
Learn more about Caspian Studios
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Sponsor
Builders Wanted is brought to you by Twilio – the Customer Engagement Platform that helps builders turn real-time data into meaningful customer experiences. More than 320,000 businesses trust Twilio to transform signals into connections—and connections into revenue. Ready to build what’s next? Learn more at twilio.com.
0:00:00.2 Kailey Raymond: Welcome to Builders Wanted, the podcast for people shaping what's next in customer engagement. Today's guest knows how to modernize mission-critical systems without compromising performance. I'm joined by Eric Helmer, Chief Technology Officer at Rimini Street, a global provider of enterprise software support and services. Eric spent his career helping some of the world's largest organizations rethink how they run, support, and evolve their tech ecosystems. At Rimini Street, he leads the charge on helping enterprises reduce risk, free up budget, and build IT strategies that align with long-term business goals, not just short-term fixes. Today, we'll get into what it means to build trust at the highest levels of enterprise IT, how to modernize without disruption, and why going against the grain is sometimes exactly the right move.
0:00:51.4 Producer : This podcast is brought to you by Twilio, the customer engagement platform that helps businesses turn real-time data into seamless, personalized experiences. Engage customers on their terms across SMS, voice, email, WhatsApp, and more. Power every interaction with AI so conversations feel natural, not robotic. Adapt in real time, delivering the right message on the right channel exactly when it matters. That's the power of Twilio. More than 320,000 businesses, from startups to Fortune 500s, trust Twilio to transform customer signals into conversations, connections, and real revenue. Reimagine the way you engage with your customers. Learn more at twilio.com.
0:01:40.0 Kailey Raymond: Eric, welcome to the show. We're really excited to have you here.
0:01:43.1 Eric Helmer: All right, thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.
0:01:45.6 Kailey Raymond: This should be really fun. I'm excited to dive in and learn from you. You've held senior IT and strategy roles across major industries, and now you're the CTO of Rimini Street, and you're helping global enterprises rewrite their tech roadmaps. So how do you define your mission as a builder within this space?
0:02:06.6 Eric Helmer: Yeah, sure. So I'm the global chief technology officer for Rimini Street. I run a team of regional CTOs and industry experts all over the world in almost every major landscape across the globe. And our job is to help organizations on their enterprise software journeys and on their roadmaps and planning for the next 3 to 5 to 10 years. You know, I think a lot of organizations today are at a crossroads of what to do with ERP platforms like Oracle and SAP and other enterprise software to go, especially in the light of today's vendors trying to force people to move their software to their subscription-based clouds. And CIOs today, they just don't know who to believe, and they don't know who to turn to. Everyone's trying to sell them stuff, right? So what I do with my organization is I help our customers navigate these waters and look at every option that they have so that they can make the best informed decision for them and help them be educated on what other organizations are doing. We have over 6,000 signed customers all over the world, and everyone's kind of in the same boat.
0:03:11.7 Eric Helmer: And so what I do is try to help people understand what other people are doing to maximize their enterprise software investments through modernization, optimization, risk elimination, and really helping them create bulletproof, future-ready landscapes that return real value back into the business. And sometimes people feel on an island, and they don't really quite know what to do about this. That's our job is to help people get through it.
0:03:37.4 Kailey Raymond: I love it. So you have a real global perspective around digital transformations and the way that companies are really kind of approaching their tech roadmaps or tech stacks. I'm wondering, as this kind of expert in this field, what's a misconception you're hearing about modernizing tech stacks from enterprise leaders?
0:03:57.8 Eric Helmer: Oh, yeah. Probably the number one misconception is that organizations today must follow the vendor-dictated roadmap that they've always done, right? I think people just are used to, well, we upgrade every three years, we have to keep current on our enterprise systems, which means they're constantly in that hamster wheel of upgrading, and that they have to follow what the vendor says, right? I think that was true in the past, right? We didn't really have much options back then. We had to. You always asked, what shop are you? Oh, we're an Oracle shop, we're an SAP shop, we're an IBM shop, whatever that is. But today, it's just not true anymore. There's so many options that are out there, so many cloud options, so many system integrators, so many security companies and things that are out there that offer specialized tools today that can give outcomes faster and more feature-rich with a lot less risk into the organization. So I think today, Rimini Street can really help organizations take the power back, to push back on those pressures to move the cloud and show that a new era of ERP, which is now really more of a collection of different platforms that are integrated together, that's modular in nature, that can give much better business outcomes much faster and a much more significant cost savings, right? So you really have to talk people through that traditional thinking and kind of talk to them about different ways of achieving outcomes that isn't necessarily all in on one big monolithic ERP provider.
0:05:31.9 Kailey Raymond: I love this conversation. We're really talking about sweets and kind of these, in many ways, some of these like walled gardens that are bringing you into their ecosystems and this idea around whether it's like composability, but adaptability and flexibility within your tech stack. And I imagine that there's some element of wanting to make sure you're understanding how all of these things interlock and play well together and make sure that they're passing the right information back and forth so that it is as fast, as reliable, as whatever, as one system. And this might be your answer here, but I'm wondering if like there's a major shift that you're seeing with IT leaders and their approach to this long-term transformation.
0:06:15.3 Eric Helmer: Oh, well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the traditional CIO, right, the traditional CIO was a person that oversaw the cost center, right? They were the person that kept the lights on, right? They were firefighters that would go and just fix stuff that broke and keep the machines up and running. And they were really a necessary expense to the business, right? That was just the cost of doing business. You have to have IT, right? But that whole office is changing, you know? They're expected now to use these new emerging technologies like AI and machine learning to do these magical things in their organization that is going to provide a game-changing types of functionality within the business. They're now charged with having to create very detailed board-ready business plans that can justify ROI back into the business on the projects, right? So I think just doing IT projects for the simple sake of doing IT projects or in justifying that, well, we have to stay current or, well, we've got to follow best practices those things are just not being justified anymore. And I think CIOs now are expected to move from the back office demand responder to now the demand generator that is going to now return things back into the businesses.
0:07:34.2 Eric Helmer: And some CIOs are struggling with that shift. And that's why we're seeing a lot of change in that CIO office because now they're expected to go from firefighters to innovators and from demand responders to demand creators is what I call it. So it's kind of a different shift. And people are either going to get on board with that or they're going to be replaced.
0:07:53.8 Kailey Raymond: This is really interesting because what you're saying is really that this role and this function is moving from something that's historically been, you might say reactive, to being something that's quite proactive. And you kind of mentioned this as well a little bit at the top of what you were just saying, which is you mentioned cost center, like it's a necessary evil in the business. But I would imagine that the role of IT is really shifting closer to what we might call competitive advantage. And so how do you help them in making that transition?
0:08:22.8 Eric Helmer: I learned a great lesson one time from this CIO in Paris at an event. The CIO was a brand new CIO, so he's only been on for about a month or so. And when you're a new CIO, the first thing you've got to figure out is what message you just inherit, right? And so what he had the team do is he had the team take all the systems that they have. I think it was 300 some odd systems that he had. And he put them in one of three buckets, right? And so bucket one is, is this a system of record? Is this a transactional system? Is this a system that's simply designed to run the business? It's that necessary system that just does the back office stuff, right? Bucket two, is this a system of differentiation, right? Are we doing something different with this system? We have it and they don't, right? It's some sort of intellectual property, maybe a patented solution or some sort of secret sauce, right? And then the third bucket, is this a system of innovation, right? So, this is the wild west. It's a bunch of developers.
0:09:23.4 Eric Helmer: They're going to fail 99 times out of 100. But boy, once they hit that one, that one, it could be just a complete game changer for the business or even the industry that they're in. So then you overlap the budget, IT budget that's on top of all that stuff. And you try to figure out where's all my money going? And how much percentage do you think that that CIO found was in bucket one? I can tell you it was about 95%.
0:09:49.8 Kailey Raymond: Yeah, you're not really investing in the moonshots.
0:09:52.5 Eric Helmer: Exactly. And that is an eye-opener. And I suggest all of your listeners to go through this exercise because it is eye-opening to see that 95% of budgets today are going on back office transactional systems of record. And that really only leaves pennies left over for innovation and innovation. And then people start very quickly realizing that you're not innovating with a lot of this enterprise software with ERPs. You're just running the business. So people really want to start looking at how to start moving money from bucket one and start getting it more in bucket two and bucket three. And as you start really looking at cost reduction exercises in order to do that, you're able to find ways of minimizing. I mean, those are necessary systems, don't get me wrong, but we can minimize the costs associated with those through the forced upgrades and the forced patching and all that stuff.
0:10:44.0 Kailey Raymond: That's a really interesting way to think about it because it's really thinking about investing in your growth drivers from a systems perspective. And I always say this on my team, which is like probably 80% of what you do is planned. It's probably like part of running the business, but like at least 20% is probably all these moonshots, these innovations, these things that are exciting that are actually going to be growth drivers for the business. We need to explore or else we're not going to actually meet our growth targets and our goals. And so there's always this pressure to make sure that you can innovate as quickly as possible. But enterprise systems don't always move very fast, Eric. So I'm wondering of like, how do you help these companies make these smart, future-ready moves without creating chaos in their day-to-day?
0:11:34.4 Eric Helmer: Well and you're right, the monolithic platforms today are just not moving at the speed of business that does need today. And I think that's why companies today are trying to push back on these vendors who are trying to force them to do these re-implementations that just have the same, similar or less functionality, which they started after a five-year, $50 million migration that just is not going to give them the speed that they need. So you're right. People need to innovate more quickly. And the vendor solutions are often quite slow. So really what I suggest is people really looking at the emerging technologies today, AI and machine learning, of course, but take incremental steps, right? And do step-by-step returns, understanding what the ERP is, and maybe more importantly, what the ERP is not, right? And what it is, is a fantastic ledger, right? It's a fantastic system of record. It's a fantastic backbone of the transactional systems that we need. And where you want to innovate is around that ERP, not with the ERP. So by adding on incremental functionalities that you can do, you're going to get there so much quicker and faster with the no code, low code platforms and things like that. But you're going to be able in a way that you reserve the right to change your mind later.
0:12:50.8 Eric Helmer: So if that product or that solution is not working or something better comes out, you can suddenly remove that from the organization and plug something back in quite easily, right? So we need to be able to switch gears as needed, understanding that speed of innovation, knowing that what we pick today might be completely different tomorrow. And these big long-term contract locked-in models from these big vendor cloud projects are just going backwards in that modular agile way that we need to do things.
0:13:19.7 Kailey Raymond: I am picking up on this theme from you today, which is agility, flexibility, adaptability are incredibly important. And especially as these tech stacks get more and more complex. I mean, you've mentioned a couple of AI kind of platforms or different technologies, low code, no code, all of these things, which might kind of fit into that third bucket of big innovation that you're talking about. How do you keep customer engagement simple and strategic under that lens of complexity?
0:13:49.5 Eric Helmer: Well, you're right. And it can be extremely complex out there because there's vendors popping up all over the place. I think it just comes down to trust. When you show organizations that you genuinely want to help them by showing them all the different options that they have in an agnostic way, it's a really best way to build fantastic relationships and keep that engagement simple and strategic. You know, as I said before, I mean, every vendor and their associated system integrator partners, right, are all in it together to have companies make the most change as possible. The more change and transformation and re-implementations and cloud projects that you do, the more everybody gets paid along the way. And that's when people start mistrusting and make things overly complex. Right. So a strategic relationship to me is based on helping a business achieve objectives in the most cost effective way. And that's where we come in. It's we try to give them the least amount of change to achieve the objectives that they want to do. So at the end of the day, the organizations, they want to innovate, but nobody has. I don't care if you're Apple, you don't have the budget to do everything that you want to do.
0:15:10.8 Eric Helmer: You just don't. Right. So you have to prioritize and you have to figure out where you're going to spend your budgets. And really, that's where we come in. We want to make it simple. And it comes down to numbers. You want to make it simple, get it down to numbers, get real costs, real ROI, real numbers and real analysis. You have to take the emotion out of it. Right. You got to take the loyalty out of it. You got to take tradition out of it and boil it down to data points that create obvious best choices. Through data.
0:15:43.4 Kailey Raymond: I love the idea of there being so much emotion within B2B software. It's very funny. We talked around it, but we haven't kind of touched this topic directly, this elephant in the room about where AI kind of fits within this. And I'd love your kind of perspective of how you're having these conversations with CIOs across the world, which is this need to balance automation, AI, efficiency, these kind of like big, these mandates in many ways, with the human element of enterprise support. Like, what's your take on that balance today?
0:16:19.0 Eric Helmer: There's a lot of concern about that. I think people are worried, hey, is my job at jeopardy, right? Is my privacy at jeopardy once we start giving everything over to the robots, right? But it's just, there's no way we can have a world without humans, even in the next era of AI. But we just do, I think, need to rethink about the role of the human in this next era. You know, so, I mean, I think it's obvious that AI is going to certainly help with enterprise support, optimizing, self-healing, and automating traditional repeatable human tasks but it's not going to replace humans all together because humans are going to be critical even into the future. And it's just, I think humans are going to be more focused on creating and overseeing the governance and controls of AI fabrics, right? And there must be always human in the loop controls, right? And they have to be in place with policy-based orchestration that is going to be critical for human oversight. So humans are always going to have to oversee ethics and auditability and quality and things that can go wrong with that.
0:17:29.7 Eric Helmer: There has to be really good tribal knowledge of business processes that's on top of using AI as a tool for automation, but overseeing the quality and integrity of the system as a whole.
0:17:41.9 Kailey Raymond: I was listening to a couple of CMOs talk last week about a similar topic, and I think it kind of fits in here, which is a lot of what you're talking about is governance. And it feels like a lot of the new opportunities and roles that will inevitably be created is around this kind of concept of governance within AI. And you also said something around like human loop controls. I've never actually heard that phrase. I kind of love that. It has a nice ring to it. It like kind of rolls off the tongue really nicely. The way that I've always heard it in kind of marketing speak is curation or like tastemaker. So it's the same concept as you're essentially saying that the human has the ability to be the filter of what AI is doing. So that's a really interesting concept. Now, I'm wondering, like, obviously, a lot of what you do, it's not easy work. I also imagine that you're seeing some things don't play out as you might have quite expected. So if you could illuminate us with maybe a story or an example, whether it's a client or something that you've seen in the past that didn't quite go as planned, but it helped you learn something really essential that you hold on to.
0:18:52.4 Eric Helmer: To me, it's easy. It's just pull out your favorite search engine and search for failed cloud migrations from on-prem to vendor SaaS solutions. You just see it time and time again. They have such a high rate of failure and it introduces so much risk into organizations. Most of them you hear at least go over budget or over time, but many of them have to be canceled altogether in the middle of it, right? Wasting hundreds of millions of dollars. I think what's happening is that these organizations are being consulted by the vendors, right? And the vendors are promising real value of their SaaS models and this promised land of all these new functions. And we find a lot of times those promises are overinflated and people are not really understanding the complexity of these migrations were mostly reimplementations. They're not really migrations, right? And the complexity is just mind-blowing. And I think what happens is that traditional CIOs are just thinking of this as a traditional upgrade that they've done in the past. Well, we're just going from version X to version Y, but that is just not the case. They don't realize that not only going to forfeit your perpetual licenses, right, and move to this kind of locked in SaaS model, but you're going to lose all the automations and the intellectual property of all the unique customizations that you have on your on-premise models.
0:20:08.0 Eric Helmer: Those are gone, right? And all the internal unique business logic that you have now, because you're going to be cookie cutter like everybody else into a cloud. So what happened to that differentiation that we spent 20 years customizing the solution for? And then they wonder why these projects fail because they didn't take the time to really look at the real phase zero that is needed to look at what that is. Because people realize there's a lot of functionality that is missing in the software as a service model that people have in the on-premise model today that doesn't exist, right? And then they get there halfway through the project and they realize, oh, shoot, how are we going to do this? So it's really important to do all the functionality mapping, feasibility, planning, make sure there's like-for-like functionality. How do you handle all those customized processes? How to handle integrations and cybersecurity protocols now that you have stuff outside your data center walls, right? And the massive change management for end users and business disruptions. And then also really the lack of calculate. It's amazing how people just do not calculate the ROI of these projects.
0:21:17.2 Eric Helmer: Fine, if you want to spend $20 million to go to a cloud, okay, that's great. But what's the return on that investment? And what year payback do you get for that $50 million project or whatever that is? Is that you get your payback in year two or year 22, right? So people don't do the math on these things just to make sure the juice is worth the squeeze. And when they just jump in without doing all this kind of planning, that's when these projects fail. And you can Google it. The stories are ubiquitous.
0:21:44.0 Kailey Raymond: Yeah, I mean, what you're describing is like the really unglamorous side of things, which is the planning, the alignment, the mapping, the really in the weeds, the stuff that actually makes it work. I want to hear about the successes. So do you have a recent transformation that you're particularly proud of, something that might have helped a business shift gears or unlock some value that was maybe unexpected? Like what made that transformation work? What was the big win there?
0:22:17.3 Eric Helmer: Yeah, so just kind of talking about that kind of innovate around the edge of the core we see so many of these use cases. One that kind of comes to mind is a situation where someone is running, in this case, SAP ECC. And they have the four basic modules that everyone gets started with in general with us. And it's materials management, finance, sales, and production planning. And a lot of times people as they move and they grow in a company from a midsize company more into kind of a larger company, they want to expand their capabilities of their ERP and stop doing so much stuff in spreadsheets and start integrating it into the great things that the SAP does. So they want to expand their footprint to include the additional modules like HR, right? Customer relationship management, warehouse management, and so on, right? And so when people call up these vendors and say, hey, I would like to purchase these additional modules, a lot of times what happens is they say, no, we're not going to sell it to you. You're going to have to take the four modules that you have today and shift them to the RISE program, SAP RISE program, and move off to S4 into our cloud product first.
0:23:30.9 Eric Helmer: And then we'll sell you the additional modules that you can get them configured in there. And people are just like, I thought you'd be happy. You'd want to sell me these additional licenses, right? So it's just not practical. They don't want to re-implement the four modules that they did all over the place. They just want to do the incremental functionality. So that's where we help. You know, we do a full analysis here of what people, in this case, what they needed and looked at ways that they can kind of innovate around the edge. And we found out that they have a great use case to use things like Salesforce or Workday for some of the HR stuff that can kind of bolt on right on top of that core functionality of SAP. And then we show that there's a path for that customer that can save millions and millions of dollars of that re-implementation and have significant higher return on those investments than going down that forced path with some of these vendors like that. So these are really great win stories that can just save so much time and money and get those outcomes so much faster.
0:24:29.9 Kailey Raymond: I love that. And I also, I'm wondering if there's like a story about like maybe a particular data point or insight that you helped a customer uncover that just led to something like meaningful and structural and different in their approach that you took with this customer.
0:24:45.0 Eric Helmer: Gosh, there's just so many examples. If you just think of different personas that use these enterprise software, right? And you just look at their day-to-day challenges. A scenario here would be inventory management is really difficult. It sounds kind of simple, but it's really difficult a lot for companies to ensure that the inventory and all of their warehouses all over the place are completely optimized with the exact stock that they need any given moment. Not too much, not too little, right? And a lot of times, through companies growth that people have to log into multiple systems just in order to get insights. They're logging into their ERP, they're logging into the vendor management system because they have the supply chain for that. They're logging into the inventory management system. And it's taking so much time to track all that stuff and resolve all that stuff and make sure all that stuff is in sync. And what happens is it leads to a lot of mistakes. And mistakes can be extremely costly in this world because there's no stock. If there's no stock, I can't sell it, right? , I can't move it, or it's inaccurate or we didn't do the right forecasting or we shipped in the wrong day.
0:25:53.5 Eric Helmer: So this ultimately can lead to loss of revenue. So I think what happens is people immediately think, well we're going to have to solve this problem by combining and consolidating all of those systems into one. So they're all kind of self aware to that. But boy, how expensive is that to rip out three major huge systems and consolidate it into one. So you know, what we can do is we can take a look at that. What we can do is we can put a modern intelligent workspace on top of all three of those systems and put a workflow engine and we use ServiceNow and we can put a layer of integration on top of all of these systems, all on one single interface. So that that person who's doing inventory management now has in one workspace an integration platform that calls out predictions of stock out issues. It says, hey, you have a problem here, here's the three ways that you can resolve it and here's the probability of success that you're able to actually do that. It can even have a chatbot on there that you can interact with and say, hey, how much of product A do I have in warehouse B and what's my next probability of being out of stock for that?
0:27:05.3 Eric Helmer: You know, when you do this all with a low code, no code platform, you're doing it in weeks and months, weeks and months. Imagine how much it would be to consolidate all three of those environments just to to solve this problem. So this has really created a huge shift in our approach and how we attack business problems and assist customers. Again, focusing on getting business outcomes done in the most cost effective way that isn't related to complete rip and replace projects that people just can't justify. So faster, smarter and a heck of a lot less expensive. That is really the shift in the value that I think that we're providing the aha moment I think that we have today.
0:27:46.2 Kailey Raymond: And you're getting these faster feedback loops, right? So you're building trust quicker and you're able to see that this is working quicker than committing to something that might take three years to overhaul. It makes perfect sense to me. And it seems like we're kind of moving from this big overhaul to this kind of small shift model. Again, adaptability, flexibility, some level of composability seems to be kind of coming through in this conversation. Do you have an example, and I mean we kind of just talked about this a tiny bit but like of a low profile change, let's call it. That made a surprising difference. One of these small shifts that had a bigger effect than you expected.
0:28:24.8 Eric Helmer: Oh, you're right. Some of the... Even the smallest things can have major impact. What I really suggest for people to identify those low hanging fruit, right, the big rocks, right, that people are looking for. I think it's really important to have a third party look at people's implementations because people have blinders hunting, right? They only know what they know over the last 10, 20 years. They don't know that maybe they have some opportunities to improve their configuration, improve their business processes. Because you're going to have an outsider's view to look in that might know best practices across many, many, many implementations that can bring that knowledge into that. And I think the problem with that is, especially when people are considering migrating everything to a SaaS cloud, that what they're doing is they're taking potentially bad processes, bad configurations and lifting and shifting them over to now a new version so you have the same exact bad processes and configurations in there. You're just now putting it into another version as opposed to taking the opportunity for that change. That definitely disruption to look at, hey, maybe we should tidy our place up first and really get to lean and mean, relook at all of our customizations, look at our business process, optimize what we have today, get the best out of the asset today and then later if we want to then move that over to a cloud model we can.
0:29:50.3 Eric Helmer: But I think people are, are missing the opportunity, especially data cleanup operations now so we can get ready for the robots to go out there and start giving us more meaningful intelligence on decent data. I think the other insight that I think we show to people is just uncover how much people are at risk with vendor provided support. I think people feel that they're safe. I'm safe because I'm with the vendor who actually wrote the program to do my support program. But a lot of times the truth is that the support programs are many times just inadequate for the Mission criticality of these workloads, you're waiting days and weeks and months to try to get someone to call you back or you're given a whole bunch of documentation, stacks of documentation here, read through this and see if any of that stuff helps for you. So you're really doing self support yourself or you're waiting for some patch for months to come out. You know these systems, they're mission critical, right? I mean, they can't be less than 100% available 24 hours a day. A day. They just simply can't.
0:30:58.0 Eric Helmer: And that coupled with the vendors telling you you have to force migration and have that, especially with the massive amount of money they charge every year for that annual maintenance and support, it just is a risky proposition. And once you get people to really understand that risk profile that they have today and realize that with Remini Street's model, we have someone logging into your system and a high severity ticket in less than two minutes. Two minutes. Less than two minutes. Fixing problems all over the world, 24 hours a day in almost any language you can speak. So that's really the only way to adequately support these mission critical systems and mitigate the risks associated with these vendor programs. So there's some insights I think that we were able to uncover in our relationships with clients.
0:31:42.9 Kailey Raymond: I love it. I love the passion too, Eric. You really care about what you do and it shows and it comes through.
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0:32:44.8 Kailey Raymond: I'm going to pivot back to trends. You live and breathe this space, so I want to hear what's going on in your brain around the future. So is there an emerging tech trend that you're watching closely? What is that?
0:32:59.3 Eric Helmer: Yeah, you want to know who's going to be the winner of the day? I call it the control tower. And really what this is, is it's a big race right now to create agents, right? AI agents. Big race. Everyone's out there. Microsoft's doing it. Everyone's going out there. All right. But which agent do you choose, right? Which one do you choose? And now businesses are at this conundrum of trying to figure out, well, who do I jump in? Well, now what's happening is people are talking about inter-agent communication, right? Having agents aware for one another, controlling one another, passing data and stuff back and forth to one another. Okay, well, that's scary, maybe. But then it is now you're talking about people, well, okay, what if I use that agent for that one, this agent, that agent for this one? Are they going to communicate with one another? Who's going to control this? The winner in this space is going to be that control tower layer. It's the one that's going to be on top of all this using their agents and other vendors' agents that can control the entire ecosystem in one common place that's going to get along with the rest, that's going to be able to be aware of all the protocols and communication methods between theirs and everybody else's and command that top spot. So watch the race in that because that, to me, is going to be the winner, who's going to sit on top of all this stuff.
0:34:16.9 Kailey Raymond: That's very cool. I haven't heard that take yet, but it makes complete sense. And it ties back to what we were talking about earlier around governance and human in the loop. It's like that's the big spot that we got to watch out for when AIs are passing info back and forth to each other.
0:34:31.1 Eric Helmer: You bet.
0:34:31.9 Kailey Raymond: Is there a company or a leader that you admire that is really bringing bold customer-first thinking into everything that they do?
0:34:40.8 Eric Helmer: Well, I like ServiceNow. I mean, we have a partnership with them. But to me, it's just, in a day where you're trying to have all of the vendors lock people into these ever-rising subscription models that are just going to cripple budgets over time, what I really like about what ServiceNow is doing is they're creating ERP modernization capabilities that are designed to provide that fast, low-code, no-code modernization on top of existing systems, right, that don't require these huge disruptive upgrades but still get that modern UI, right, still get that workflow. And it does these technologies across the entire enterprise, not just within your ERP. So you can spend all that time and money to get these incremental AI or UI features, but you only did that within that one ERP. When you put something like ServiceNow on top of it, you really get it across your entire enterprise in weeks and months as opposed to years. So you can just imagine that the combination of the cost savings that Rimini Street can get from a support perspective to be the funding mechanism into a modernization program with something like ServiceNow that can give you the ROI from those workflows and the automations that's going to return value.
0:35:59.7 Eric Helmer: I mean, the value proposition is just staggering. So it's a beautiful yin-yang partnership that we have with ServiceNow that's just going to save people from doing these crazy upgrades that they don't want to do, but still really modernizing the heck out of and getting the most out of these enterprise softwares.
0:36:16.7 Kailey Raymond: I love it. Two more questions for you, Eric. OK. First one, what's one thing every CIO should start or stop doing?
0:36:26.9 Eric Helmer: You know, again, I may sound like a broken record, but I think it's just it's rethinking the traditional models, right? We have to really understand and play a very critical role in enterprise software and understanding it for what it is. I think traditionally, and I thought this way, just like everybody else, right? The ERP is the center of the world, right? And everything revolves around it. If there was a contention of where to spend this $1 and the ERP folks wanted it versus somebody else, the ERP folks always got it, right? Because that was really the center of the world. And I think the time has really changed and to really reduce that ERP really to what it is and really what it is not. And take advantage of the fantastic features that it has. And we do realize it's mission critical. It can never go down. It always has to be up. Someone always has to be paying attention to it and making what that is. But let's face it, it's not strategic. It's not a competitive advantage, right? You're not really growing your company with it. So it doesn't really give you a path to growth.
0:37:29.6 Eric Helmer: So what I really think CIOs should stop doing is stop thinking about the ERP as the center of the world, but look at it as a data source for a new center of the world, right? And once you start really thinking in that, that's where I think people are going to go on their modernization journey.
0:37:48.5 Kailey Raymond: Shift the thinking. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Last question for you, Eric. If there's a piece of advice that you have for technologists who are looking to build right now, what would that be?
0:38:04.0 Eric Helmer: It's really shocking when I talk to organizations and how siloed IT is from the rest of the organization. My biggest advice, I think, from technologists is to really anchor in trust and business outcomes and just complete transparency. People really need to spend a good portion of their time off the keyboard and inside people's offices to form strategic alliances with business units and have internal champions and partners all throughout the business so that we're doing things together. It's so funny sometimes that the CIO and CFO never even talk. If they do talk, it's like, are you going to give me my budget this year or not? And that's it. So we have to put in a mesh of trust and transparency that we're all rolling in the same direction to achieve corporate objectives. We don't want to do IT just for the sake of IT. We want to do it as a business enabler for where the business is going. And without that trust, you're just not going to move the needle as much as possible.
0:39:17.9 Eric Helmer: And to gain trust with users and employees, it's going to be super, super important to show how you're on their side, to make their experience with the system and explain why you're doing things. A lot of people are just like, hey, we've got a new feature. No one explained why. No one involved the users in the very beginning to ensure that was even something that they needed or wanted. But if you make it around, hyper focus on that user experience and make it the best possible experience, and also make sure that they trust that their security and privacy and reliability is all going to be taken care of as well. I think a lot of people forget the soft side of what technologists need to do.
0:39:52.5 Kailey Raymond: I love that. It often comes down to that. It's the unsexy human side of things that really actually moves the needle on these big transformations. You cannot forget that people are the ones that are actually doing this and they need to communicate with each other and be on the same page. Eric, thank you so much for being here. I learned a ton. Fiery conversation today. Appreciate the advice. Good to chat.
0:40:17.2 Eric Helmer: Good. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.