Concord, Massachusetts-based Welch’s, the processing and marketing subsidiary of the National Grape Cooperative, is using Rimini Street of Las Vegas, Nevada, to support its Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) application and Oracle database software.
Rimini Street is a global provider of enterprise software products and services and a third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products. By switching to Rimini Street, Welch’s “avoided the time and expense of what was seen as an unnecessary upgrade just to continue the maintenance and support relationship with the vendor,” says Rimini.
Welch’s is able to run the Oracle system for a minimum of 15 years, from the time it transitioned to Rimini Street support, and kept the flexibility to upgrade. The company saved nearly one million dollars in annual maintenance and support costs and was able to liberate internal IT resources, freeing up time to create new application extensions for the business, say the companies.
Welch’s evaluated upgrade options, including moving some applications to the cloud, but determined that such upgrades would not reduce costs nor deliver significant business value.
“Rimini Street takes ownership of the entire support experience. When we make a call, someone is available to speak right away and works on a problem immediately, which has been a refreshing change,” said Dave Jackson, CIO of Welch’s. “Recently, our team was able to get a severe issue worked on quickly and had a resolution in one hour. Also, our team is doing much less ticket and issue resolution tracking than we used to, and today, we have the confidence to take on projects, such as our browser upgrade which we purposefully delayed when we were on vendor support. Welch’s traditionally views its relationships with technology vendors as partnerships; we don’t just enter into transactional relationships. With Rimini Street, we know they will be a long-term trusted partner.”
“Welch’s, like many of our Oracle clients, determined it’s mission-critical system was meeting all the business needs and did not see value in upgrading at this time and was looking to reduce costs, increase business value and receive premium support in comparison to the vendor-dictated roadmap they were following,” said Anthony DeShazor, SVP and chief client officer, Rimini Street. “When companies come to Rimini Street, they are not only receiving unparalleled support, but are also able to unlock significant funds that can be invested in more strategic initiatives as part of a business-driven roadmap, and with Welch’s, they were able to invest these cost savings across the organization, not just IT.”
Welch’s is owned by 1,054 family-farmers across America and Ontario, Canada, who make up a cooperative and grow the Concord grape, used in Welch’s juices and other grape-based products that are sold throughout the U.S. and in approximately 50 countries.
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