 And welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios for a CUBE conversation. 2018 is winding down. I think we're at our last big show of the week, this week at CUBECon and it's always nice to get back into the studio. Things are a little bit calmer, a little bit less hectic and learn about new businesses, new companies. So we're excited to have I think first time to theCUBE, Seth Raven. He is the CEO and co-founder of Remini Street. Seth, great to see you. Thank you very much, good to be here. Yeah, welcome. So for the folks that aren't familiar with Remini Street, give us a quick overview. Sure, Remini Street is a 13 year old company. We went public last year on the NASDAQ, RMNI, thank you. We have 1,100 people or so operating in 18 countries and we're servicing nearly 2,700 companies that have moved and used Remini Street services around the world, including about 150 of the Fortune 500. And you've got a pretty interesting business model, very kind of innovative, but it's one of those like so simple and so obvious, why didn't anybody see it ahead of time? So tell the folks what your basic core business model is. Sure, the enterprise software space has about $160 billion that's spent every year on annual maintenance fees. And of that, Oracle and SAP have about $32 billion in annual fees, but this market has not been a competitive market. Those companies drive north of 90% profit margins and their customers are not all that happy with the service. So we came in and offered a service at 50% off that provides a better service overall for customers and makes them very happy. All right, so the core components of a maintenance contract, so they're paying, they pay their licensing fee and they pay whatever, 15, 20% of that licensing fee for the maintenance, they're getting patches, they're getting upgrades. What are some of the other things that should be included in that maintenance fee? Well, what they get is they would get upgrades, they would get updates, which includes tax, legal and reg updates, which everybody needs when you're running a global company or whether it's payroll taxes or financial taxes. You also need when things break, you need to get them fixed. You also need advice and counsel and these very complex large systems. And Romania Street comes in and what we don't do is we don't offer upgrades. We don't offer new versions of the product. What we do do is extend the life of these existing products for 15 and 20 years beyond what the vendor would consider their normal support life. Right, so there's a whole bunch of things that work into that. One of them is you need, they want it to be supported or they want you to have the latest patches and stuff so that they'll continue to support them. You've basically, for our earlier conversation, just basically taken over that whole responsibility. So not only the software patches and changes, but also then the support on top of that. That's right. We have support with less than five minute turnaround time with the senior engineer 24 by seven. So we've really offered a concierge level of service at half the annual fees. So our customers can save up to 90% total operating costs on these large complex systems. Right, so it's pretty, it's kind of hard to grasp at first but I think you gave a great analogy before we went on air, which is kind of like getting your car fixed. That's right. Take it to the dealer or take it to Bob's mechanic. And if you can get the quality of service, customer service, same parts, it's actually for a lot of people a better alternative. That's kind of what you're doing, right? That's right. Think of it as you can take your car to the dealer, you can take it to your local mechanic who you might think is better at fixing that system. We have hundreds of engineers around the world and we think that we are very, very good at fixing these core systems and providing the updates that are needed to keep them moving forward. And I think one of the other parts that's really important here is this is a difference between two different directions that every single licensee of someone like an Oracle or SAP product has to make a decision on. Number one, do you go down the vendor's roadmap, which includes if you follow their roadmap, that's upgrades and updates and costs that are very expensive, that are designed around what the vendor wants to do and the vendor's needs. Or you choose to go down a business-driven roadmap, which is to focus around the company and focus around competitive advantage and growth. And we are the company that works on the business-driven roadmap. Right, and you made a good point earlier because we talked about updates on our mobile phones and DevOps and we're at KubeCon, it's all about DevOps and patches are coming out all the time and updates are coming all the time. But the systems you're talking about are big, nasty, hairy ERP systems. These are not things that you want to be changing all the time and in fact, for a lot of cases, you probably don't. I would imagine the biggest value, one of the biggest values for your customers is extending that lifetime of that current install and continuing to get the support, which is threatened if they don't continue to pay the tax to the big red machine. That's correct. Instead of paying a 20% annual fee just for the maintenance on it, they can focus at saving half of that money, putting it into new innovation into their environment and the kind of changes you're talking about, they're systems of engagement. So on the front end where we interface with customers and vendors, on the front end that's constantly changing, that's a dynamic system. On the back end where we work, these are big core transaction systems where change introduces risk into the system. We want to run these systems for a long time. We don't have competitive advantage on the back end of our financial systems. Competitive advantage is done on the front end where we compete against other people in the industry. So how'd you come up with the idea? I mean, it seems so obvious on hindsight again with the car repair analogy, which is just dead simple. But what did you see? You were in the business and what was your kind of experience in kind of the other side that got you to think, hmm, here's an opportunity that I think a lot of people would like to take advantage of. So I was part of the management team building out PeopleSoft for many years and I was in a business where I was part of the team that had to try and force customers to take these upgrades. That was one of my jobs was to move people forward onto these new releases. And I had an epiphany one day that said, really, I am tired of selling people things they don't want and let's focus on selling people what they really need. And this is a function of the maturity of the products that we deal with. They are so mature that they don't need to be changed out that frequently. So we want to move away from what the vendor wants and we want to focus in on what is right for the company to allow them to shift more spending into these systems of innovation that they have to do because the CIO world, IT is changing. The mission of IT is to support competitive advantage and growth now. It's not just to run a data center. Right, and as you said, taking a patch is not just, it's not just like a quick update on your phone. You got to bring systems down. You've got labor components. You've got, again, complex APIs and connections that have to be managed. So these are pretty disruptive processes that people had to do. You had no choice if you wanted to keep your support active, right? That's right. You had to do it. And thousands of Romini Street customers don't have to worry about all those risks being introduced into their environment. And when things do need to be changed proactively, like a tax legal and regulatory update, they get those. And if they need support, they have a very fast turnaround with an assigned engineer. So we've really changed the dynamics of the support model into one that people rave about because it works very well compared to your typical call center model. We have no call center. So our customers call their engineers directly, which allows them to get support from senior people very quickly. Right, so the other part you touched on is then that frees up the CIO and the inside team to worry about front end innovation, to worry about some of these other more dynamic processes where you do have to be a little bit more active. You do have to be on the cutting edge. You do have to be more responsive to competitive threats, which is not an ERP upgrade, but it's a new app. It's a new, you know, whatever. That's correct. Versus the unplanned, unwanted, and unanticipated, you know, forced process on the backend that you didn't even maybe want to or see any benefit of. That's correct. And CIOs have to decide how they're going to distribute their budget between what we say, keeping the lights on, day-to-day operating costs, and then how much they're going to spend in innovation. And many customers wind up spending just like a federal budget deficit issue. They spend 90% of their budget keeping the lights on, paying maintenance bills, running a data center, and that leaves very little money for innovation, which they need for that competitive advantage of growth. We are helping them shift money from the side of all keeping the lights on into innovation. Right. So where do you guys go next? Is it just more of the same, but big, giant TAM, obviously, a whole lot of org, SAP, and other enterprise applications. Is that really your mission going forward and freeing up people to do the more innovative and creative, you're basically kind of offloading a big headache? Sure, but I think what you're going to watch is we expand the services that we cover. Today, we replace the vendor's maintenance tomorrow we may do more of the work inside the IT organization, all support, but expanding the definition of support so that we can provide freed up capital, time, and resources to focus on innovation. As you know, I mean, in today's world you're either growing or you're dying. There is no status quo left in this world. It's too competitive. And so we are helping companies make sure they keep their competitive edge and gain new ones. Well, it's a great story and now that you're public, we can all watch it unfold and looks like you paid off a bunch of debt recently. I was going through some of the financial information so congratulations and really interesting model. I know I use my local car repairman, Bob. I mean, as long as he keeps delivering I'll keep going back. And so I imagine once you get seated in it's probably a good long-term relationship. Yes, that's the thing. We, it's a recurring revenue business where subscription, just like a SaaS business, only where subscription revenue on maintenance. All right, well Seth, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your day and sharing the story. Thank you much. All right, he's Seth. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE with our Palo Alto studio, having CUBE Conversations. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.