Rimini Street, Inc., a global provider of enterprise software products and services, the third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products and a Salesforce partner, has appointed Eric Helmer as its chief technology officer (CTO) and announced the establishment of the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO).
As CTO at Rimini Street, Helmer is charged with helping prospects and clients design and deploy innovative solutions and roadmaps to achieve strategic IT, operational and financial goals across various enterprise applications and technology products from proprietary vendors such as Oracle, SAP, IBM, Salesforce and Microsoft and open source products such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and MongoDB database platforms. Helmer reports to Sebastian Grady, president at Rimini Street.
Rimini Street’s OCTO was created to accelerate innovation and provide prospects and clients with unique solutions and roadmaps that maximize the effectiveness of their mission-critical enterprise software systems. It was also created to help prospects and clients build a software and technology landscape that is future-proofed against a variety of technology changes and business needs, is innovation-ready to meet the needs of the enterprise today and tomorrow and is scalable and highly secure.
The OCTO will provide comprehensive, strategic, technical, functional and feature-release road-mapping advisory services and collaborate with prospects and clients to define a vision for what is next and possible in leveraging their core, mission-critical enterprise IT systems.
CTO is Proven 25-Year Technology Veteran
Helmer is an information technology executive with 25 years of experience and proven leadership delivering strategic corporate IT transformational projects. He has a strong track record in designing and implementing complex enterprise technology initiatives that provide organizations a real return on investment, competitive advantage and enable growth.
Prior to his appointment as CTO, Helmer led Rimini Street’s Strategic Services Group where he was responsible for the development and deployment of complex solutions for clients including advanced security, professional services, license management advisory, technical blueprints and cloud and migration services.
Before joining Rimini Street, Helmer was a vice president at Velocity Technology Solutions, where he led the application services team in delivering transformational cloud and IT solutions for Oracle enterprises. Additionally, he has a broad consulting background with firms such as Linium, ADI Strategies and The Hackett Group, where he has delivered many successful enterprise projects throughout the U.S., EMEA and APAC.
Helmer is a published author, Oracle ACE alumni and a sought-after, award-winning industry speaker at conferences and industry events. He also has served on many industry advisory boards, including the Oracle Developer Tools User Group (ODTUG). He holds a Master’s degree in business administration and a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science.
Current Enterprise Software as a Platform for Continuous Business Optimization
Most organizations only use a fraction of their current enterprise software system’s capabilities that they have licensed, paid for and are entitled to use. Often, organizations only leverage their ERP and other enterprise software minimally to run their basic business operations.
Rimini Street’s OCTO will work with clients to help them define best practices for both maximizing the return on their large, critical enterprise software investment and leverage their asset as a platform for continuous business optimization. The OCTO will take a holistic view of a prospect or client’s business to provide ongoing strategic advice to help improve the cost-benefit ratio of their software investment, align their software and technology roadmap to the business’ goals and help set the business or government entity up to leverage further innovation and drive growth or improved service levels. Through Rimini Street’s unique road-mapping services, a 360-degree advisory approach is taken to optimize existing platforms, including enhancing the system for functionality progression, cybersecurity hardening, technology futureproofing and cloud efficiencies.
“Organizations come to Rimini Street to gain the freedom from vendor-pressured upgrades and cloud migrations that lead to unnecessary disruption and excessive costs. Leading organizations want to follow their own business-driven roadmaps and smart paths to achieve their unique strategic IT, operational and financial goals,” said Helmer. “As leaders in enterprise software and technology, they look to Rimini Street to provide industry best practices for maximizing their current enterprise software investment through innovative and detailed roadmaps that help them create continuous value while simultaneously avoiding unnecessary, costly and disruptive software and system upgrades, migrations and projects that don’t improve competitive advantage or enable the growth or service improvements needed. I am excited to be taking on this role within the Company to deliver the highest value strategies, services and solutions to enterprise software licensees around the world.”
“We are pleased to appoint Eric to his new role as CTO, and excited to launch our new OCTO organization that will partner closely with our prospects and clients to solve real world issues and help them systematically optimize their existing enterprise software system and adjacent solutions, as well as helping them align with their organization’s goals,” said Seth A. Ravin, Rimini Street CEO. “The appointment of our CTO and the launch of the OCTO organization are major milestones as Rimini Street continues to lead the industry in redefining what award-winning enterprise software solutions look like and deliver to prospects and clients.”
