Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Coursera and Udemy said they will merge in $2.5 billion deal that combines two learning platforms and expands their enterprise reach.

Under the terms of the deal, Udemy shareholders will receive 0.80 shares of Coursera for every share they own. The two companies were rivals, but Coursera had a strong footprint in consumer and higher education and was building out its enterprise offerings. Udemy had the enterprise footprint and was expanding into other areas.

The combined company will have sales evenly divided between consumer and enterprise and be able to scale much faster.

• Udemy launches MCP server, aims to embed learning content into workflows
• Coursera's outlook highlights how genAI reskilling will be lumpy

Key points about the deal include:

• Coursera and Udemy said the combined company will have more than $1.5 billion and be able to save $115 million annually within 24 months.
• Udemy's skills development marketplace will be combined with Coursera's university ecosystem.
• Coursera CEO Greg Hart said the acquisition is designed to address how AI is redefining work. "We’re at a pivotal moment in which AI is rapidly redefining the skills required for every job across every industry. Organizations and individuals around the world need a platform that is as agile as the new and emerging skills learners must master," said Hart.
• The combined company will also be able to speed up its AI roadmap and scale sales efforts, said Udemy CEO Hugo Sarrazin.
• Coursera and Udemy will have a larger roster of instructors and subject matter experts.
• The companies have been developing similar efforts on parallel tracks, but the need for speed pointed to a merger. "This deal is about accelerating innovation. By combining our data, our talent and our resources, we can execute an AI-powered product road map far faster than either business could accomplish alone. We will leverage our insights to deliver personalized adaptive learning experiences that support career advancement for individuals and integrate directly into the flow of work for enterprise customers," said Sarrazin.
• The combined platform of the Coursera-Udemy combination will include Coursera Coach, Udemy's AI Role Play simulation technology and MCP server.
• Udemy has more than 17,000 enterprise customers and Coursera brings a total learner base of 191 million people. The combined company will have more than 270 million individual learners.

Speaking on a conference call with analysts, Hart said the timing was right for a merger. "To understand why this combination is necessary now, we must first look at the reality our learners and customers face. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39% of key skills will change in the next 5 years. And our own data shows that 86% of learners come to Coursera specifically to transform their careers. Learners need guidance on the skills they need to advance their career. Organizations need talent and tools that adapt. Both need a platform as agile as the rapidly evolving labor market," said Hart.

Hart added that the combined company will be better equipped to address lifelong learning. "Together, we'll build a unified system of record that allows leaders to benchmark, develop and track the skills of their talent across every stage of their career," said Hart.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

IFS said it will acquire Softeon, a cloud native software provider for warehouses. IFS, which provides an industrial AI platform, will use Softeon to expand into warehouse management and connect it to manufacturing operations software.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

For IFS, Softeon also gives it a bigger footprint. IFS said warehouse management and execution is a natural expansion of its manufacturing expertise. The argument is that production and distribution are being tightly integrated. Softeon's portfolio includes a warehouse management system, warehouse execution software and distributed order management.

"The warehouse is the next frontier for Industrial AI. As we work with increasingly complex global manufacturers and asset-intensive enterprises, warehouse operations must become as intelligent and autonomous as the production lines they support," said IFS CEO Mark Moffat, who added that Softeon's warehouse expertise will complement IFS' next-gen AI, robotics and industrial offerings.

• IFS teams up with Anthropic, Siemens, Boston Dynamics, 1X, showcases industrial AI use cases

According to the companies, IFS and Softeon will bring industrial AI to warehouse operations and ultimately replace legacy systems and manual processes. The companies plan to meld Softeon's platform with IFS' AI offerings including IFS Loops Digital Workers. Softeon already features native integrations with robotics, voice and automation systems.

In New York, IFS outlined its vision at its Industrial X Unleashed conference. IFS outlined partnerships with Anthropic, Boston Dynamics and 1X Technologies to create AI-driven autonomous warehouses that blend physical AI and humanoid robots.

IFS customers are in warehouse heavy industries such as aerospace and defense, energy, engineering and construction, manufacturing and transportation. Softeon's core industries are retail, third party logistics, food and beverage, healthcare and manufacturing.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

CFO confidence has it its highest point in four years as 59% of CFOs say it's a good time to take risks, according to Deloitte's fourth quarter CFO Signals report.

Deloitte's survey found that external risks to the economy are still plentiful, but also manageable. CFOs are optimistic about their companies' growth prospects. Deloitte said the fourth quarter CFO confidence score was 6.6 out of 10 possible, the highest since the fourth quarter of 2021.

CFOs globally expect their respective economies to be better a year from now. Fifty-five percent of North American CFOs expect the economy to be better a year from now, followed by 58% of CFOs in Europe and 46% of China CFOs. Asia CFOs excluding China are the most bullish with 61% seeing a better economy a year from now.

Also see:

• Enterprise Technology Intelligence Monthly Update: December 2025
• Constellation Research's CXO Confidence Survey
• How CxOs are thinking about IT budgets, AI in 2026
• Constellation Research's 2025 AI Survey

Meanwhile, 86% of CFOs are more optimistic about their companies prospects than they were 3 months ago.

With that optimism surging among CFOs, it's not surprising that those execs want to take more risks. According to Deloitte, 59% of CFOs think it's a good time to take on greater risk, up from 36% in the third quarter.

And cuts in interest rates are beginning to make debt financing more attractive say 53% of CFOs.

As for risks, CFOs have plenty of them that could curb their risk appetite. The highest external risks were economy, inflation, interest rates and cybersecurity. Internal risks were cost management, efficiency and productivity, talent and data strategies.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Databricks said it has raised $4 billion in a Series L investment for a $134 billion valuation and topped a $4.8 billion annual revenue run rate in the third quarter. For comparison, Snowflake’s annual revenue run rate exiting its third quarter was $4.84 billion.

The latest funding round is becoming an annual event where Databricks outlines its annual revenue run rate. In August, Databricks was valued at $100 billion. A year ago, Databricks said its annual revenue run rate was $3 billion.

Perhaps the biggest question in 2026 is whether Databricks will get to a Z Series of funding before going public. The latest round of funding for Databricks was led by Insights Partners, Fidelity and JP Morgan with participation from BlackRock, Blackstone and a bevy of others positioning to get in Databricks before an IPO.

Databricks outlined a few key figures.

• Third quarter revenue growth topped 55%.
• Databricks' data warehousing business topped a $1 billion annual revenue run rate.
• AI products topped a $1 billion annual revenue run rate too.
• Databricks said vibe coding and genAI is accelerating data-intelligent apps built on Lakebase, Databricks Apps and Agent Bricks.
• The company has seen positive free cash flow over the last 12 months.
• Lakebase is growing revenue at twice the base of data warehousing.
• Databricks has more than 700 customers consuming more than $1 million in annual revenue run rate.

Databricks said it will use the capital to provide liquidity for employees, future acquisitions and AI research.

Databricks 2025:

• Google Cloud Gemini models go GA on Databricks
• Databricks, OpenAI form $100 million partnership
• Databricks valued at $100 billion
• Databricks Data & AI Summit Key Takeaways
• Databricks Summit 2025: The Lakehouse Becomes a Decision Platform
• Databricks natively integrates Google Cloud Gemini models
• Databricks launches Mosaic Agent Bricks, Lakeflow Designer, Lakehouse
• Databricks acquires Neon, sees Postgres scaling key to agentic AI
• Databricks forges partnership with Anthropic, adds innovative system to enhance open source LLMs
• Databricks forges partnership with Anthropic, adds innovative system to enhance open source LLMs
• SAP launches Business Data Cloud, partnership with Databricks: Here's what it means

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Costco is weaving artificial intelligence throughout its operations but doing it in what CEO Ron Vachris calls a "very Costco way."

"AI is also being interwoven into our business where we believe it can strengthen our model," said Vachris. "We're approaching it in a very Costco way, practical, member-focused and grounded in tangible business value."

Indeed, Costco isn't into doing enterprise AI proclamations. In fact, its IT architecture is built on Microsoft Azure with Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform for AI with a heavy dose of proprietary applications. Costco Travel leverages Microsoft Dynamics 365 on Azure. Costco's app is functional but doesn't dazzle you either. That's the beauty of Costco though. The big-box retailer has a cult-like following and a private-label brand Kirkland Signature, not to mention the hot dog and soda combo for $1.50.

Yet that following and experience is why there's so much upside in leveraging enterprise technology and AI.

For Costco, e-commerce and digital efforts can provide a lot of revenue upside. For instance, Costco's e-commerce operations accounted for 7% of net sales in 2025. Including Costco Travel, digital sales were 10% of 2025 revenue. For comparison, Walmart's Sam's Club had e-commerce sales that were more than 27% of revenue for the nine months ended Oct. 31.

Costco said in its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it needs to close the digital gap. "We must keep pace with changing member expectations and new developments by our competitors. Our members are increasingly using mobile phones, tablets, computers, and other devices to shop and otherwise interact with us. We are making investments in our websites and mobile applications. If we are unable to make, improve, or develop relevant member-facing technology in a timely manner, our ability to compete and our results of operations could be adversely affected," the company said.

In 2017, Costco said it would build its hybrid cloud operations on Microsoft Azure. Costco is also using Google Cloud's Vertex AI and data cloud services and recent job postings for developers emphasize know-how on the hyperscaler's offerings.

Vachris, speaking on Costco's first quarter earnings call, said:

"This isn't about technology for technology's sake, it's about using technology to strengthen the fundamentals that makes Costco who we are, increasing member loyalty, driving top-line sales and improving efficiency in our operations so that we can bring goods to market at the lowest possible price."

Vachris outlined a few key use cases for Costco. Vachris said the implementation of scanning memberships at entry, the Costco Digital Wallet and pre-scanning small- to medium-sized baskets is leading to better member experience and improved productivity.

"The warehouses that are first to adopt this pre-scan technology have shown checkout speed improvements of up to 20%. And across our U.S. warehouses overall, we achieved record levels of checkout productivity in the final weeks of the quarter," said Vachris.

Costco is also focusing on personalization in its apps and product recommendations. Vachris said Costco is seeing a sales lift due to more relevant product recommendations.

On the back end, Costco is focused on leveraging AI in its inventory systems.

"An early use case has involved integrating AI into our pharmacy inventory system. This system now compares prescription drug pricing across vendors and autonomously and predictively reorders inventory, improving our in-stocks to more than 98%," said Vachris. "This change has played an important role in helping us achieve mid-teen growth in pharmacy scripts filled and has improved margins while lowering prices to our members."

Now Costco is looking to improve its gas business with AI tools. "We're now in the process of deploying AI tools in our gas business, which we expect will improve inventory management and drive incremental sales by ensuring we are always delivering the best value to our members," said Vachris.

Rolling out AI-driven tools at Costco is the result of fundamental changes that have been underway for multiple years. Vachris said:

"Technology and bringing the company along has been a focus for several years. A couple of years ago, we really focused on our fundamental base systems and our core systems behind the scenes that will allow us to build for the future. And so, we're now coming to a fruition where we're starting to see the benefits of that hard work of all the backroom systems that we had to build that are now coming to light and coming to the front phase for our members. We feel that technology is going to be part of the -- big part of our future.

Our mantra is to bring goods to market at the lowest possible price. And we think AI has a great asset to that, and it really can help us become a much better merchant out there."

Indeed, at Constellation Connected Enterprise 2025, Indy Cho, VP Analytics and Data Products, said the retailer is looking to create a flywheel between data, inventory, demand and pricing. "Understanding the demand at a localized level is an incredibly challenging task. Every time you shop that's a demand signal. We get that back to buyers, and we they go through a tremendous amount of analysis to figure out how much product needs to get to the right location," said Cho. "The bar for a higher level of accuracy is absolutely necessary but that doesn't mean we don't stop experimenting."

Productivity gains and expansion

Gary Millerchip, Costco CFO, said the technology investments have led to gains that have held the line on expenses. "These productivity improvements fully offset wage investments and the impact of extended operating hours and would have created positive leverage in the quarter had we not experienced higher health care costs. Central was lower or better by 3 basis points," said Millerchip.

In its first fiscal quarter, Costco delivered revenue of $66 billion, up 8.2% from a year ago. Net income in the quarter was $2 billion, or $4.50 a share. Same-store sales in the first quarter were up 6.4%, comparable tickets were up 3.2% and digitally enabled sales grew 20.5%.

For its fiscal year ended Aug. 31, Costco's gross margins were 11.12% of sales, up from 10.92% in fiscal 2024. Sales, general and administrative expenses as a percentage of sales were 9.25%, up slightly from 9.14% in 2024. For fiscal 2025, Costco reported net income of $8.1 billion, or $18.21 a share, on revenue of $275.23 billion.

In addition, Costco's efficiency push has enabled it to expand into new revenue streams. For instance, Costco has multiple revenue streams that complement its core retail business. The retailer ended the first quarter with 81.4 million paid memberships that form the base of its data flywheel.

Costco has its travel business as well as a retail media unit as well as financial services. In the first quarter, Millerchip noted that Costco's travel business and media unit were tailwinds in its first quarter. These businesses also create a data flywheel that can be leveraged.

"The first priority with personalization is to deliver a better member experience and deliver more targeted relevant messaging so we drive more items in the basket, more visits to the warehouse, more visits online. And as you do those things, it just creates an even more compelling value proposition for our media partners. While we're building and executing on that capability."

Takeaways

• Costco is a fine example of pragmatic AI and IT.
• Costco's anti-hype approach to AI is refreshing given the hype-fest today.
• The real differentiation for Costco is in inventory, pricing and warehouse efficiency.
• The stack for Costco isn't flashy or bleeding edge but focused on value.
• Costco's experience and business logic is what's proprietary. Technology is just a means to deliver.
• But if Costco can simply close the technology gap between it and rivals it has plenty of digital commerce upside to complement its real-life customer experiences.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Nvidia launched its Nemotron 3 family of open models as it aims to provide an efficient set of large language models that can be used by enterprises to customize and deploy in multi-agent systems.

The company said it is releasing open models, training data and libraries. Nvidia, which doesn't have to worry about monetizing models since it cashes in on GPU sales, is focused on providing tools to build agentic AI systems, which will use multiple LLMs focused on various tasks.

Nvidia is also filling in a major US open model gap. Meta's Llama hasn't been updated as the company has retooled its AI unit and may be focusing on proprietary models.

Nemotron 3 models will come in three sizes--Nano, Super and Ultra. Nemotron 3 Nano provides 4x higher throughput than Nemotron 2 and delivers the most tokens per second for multi-agent systems at scale.

The Nemotron 3 Super and Ultra models use a hybrid latent mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture.

Key points about the Nemotron 3 models include:

• Nemotron 3 is aimed at multi-agent use cases with a focus on issues such as context drift and high inference costs.
• Nvidia argues that the open approach gives enterprise transparency. That transparency will give developers trust to automate workflows.
• Customization is critical and the open approach enables more specialization.
• Nemotron 3 Nano is a small, 30-billion-parameter model that activates up to 3 billion parameters at a time. Nemotron 3 Nano is designed for efficiency and tasks including software debugging and content summarization.
• Nemotron 3 Super is a high-accuracy reasoning model with approximately 100 billion parameters and up to 10 billion active per token. Nemotron 3 Super is designed for multi-agent applications.
• Nemotron 3 Ultra is a large reasoning engine with about 500 billion parameters and up to 50 billion active per token. Nemotron 3 Ultra is designed for complex AI applications.
• Super and Ultra use Nvidia's 4-bit NVFP4 training format on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture.
• Nvidia released three trillion tokens of new Nemotron pretraining, post-training and reinforcement learning datasets as well as safety datasets.

Nvidia outlined multiple early adopters ranging from Accenture to CrowdStrike to Oracle, Palantir and ServiceNow to name a few.

The game plan for Nvidia is to use Nemotron 3 to give developers options to mix and match open models with proprietary offerings to optimize costs.

Nemotron 3 Nano is available now on Hugging Face and inference service providers including Baseten, DeepInfra, Fireworks, FriendliAI, OpenRouter and Together AI. Nemotron is also available on platforms from Couchbase, DataRobot, H2O.ai, JFrog, Lambda and UiPath. And Nemotron 3 Nano is available on AWS via Amazon Bedrock with availability on Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Microsoft Foundry, Nebius, Nscale and Yotta on deck.

According to Nvidia, Nemotron 3 Super and Ultra will be available in the first half of 2026.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Freshworks said it will acquire FireHydrant in a move that will build out its IT service and operations management efforts.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

FireHydrant specializes in AI-driven IT operations management software. The plan for Freshworks is to combine FireHydrant with its ITSM platform. FireHydrant was backed by Menlo Ventures and Salesforce.

Here's a look at FireHydrant's platform documentation. FireHydrant, founded in 2018, offers a complete alerting and incident management system. Using AI, FireHydrant automates manual workflows, continually looks for signals about upcoming problems, standardizes processes, alerts and pages responders and integrates with multiple monitoring systems.

• Freshworks delivers strong Q3, ups outlook, targets business teams
• Liz Miller on Freshworks’ pivot

Dennis Woodside, CEO and President of Freshworks, said FireHydrant will accelerate the company's vision of unifying IT and employee experiences. With FireHydrant, Freshworks can move up to compete better with ServiceNow and PagerDuty.

The companies said they will be able to provide a unified AI-native experience that includes:

• Unified visibility for finding IT problems and fixing them.
• Fast responses using FireHydrant's AI to summarize incident context and playbooks to deal with them.
• Proactive IT and asset management.

Freshworks said the FireHydrant purchase will close in the first quarter of 2026.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Rimini Street's first act took 20 years, but the second one will move much faster as the company aims to layer agentic AI over legacy enterprise resource planning systems. The strategy: Enable enterprises to accelerate their automation and AI plans while relegating reliable yet legacy systems to plumbing.

At its Dec. 3 Analyst and Investor Day, Rimini Street held what could be called a long overdue roadshow. Rimini Street was founded in 2005 with the mission of providing maintenance and support services to ERP customers of Oracle and SAP. The win for customers: Rimini Street could offer maintenance at a lower cost and enable enterprises to put off ERP upgrades.

As you can imagine, Rimini Street’s value prop didn’t go over well with ERP vendors. Oracle and Rimini Street legal battle started in 2010 and ended July 7 in a settlement. During that 15-year legal battle, Rimini Street went public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger in 2017. Yes, Rimini Street SPACed well before it became trendy.

Rimini Street's second act, which will run from 2026 to 2030, includes an AI spin to its traditional ERP services. The company plans to maintain ERP systems, give customers the ability to put off costly upgrades and relegate them to systems of record plumbing. The new UI for these legacy systems will be agentic AI. The company launched Rimini Street Agentic UX, which has been deployed across multiple customers, in a move that aims to abstract away ERP systems by focusing on AI workflows and processes.

In many ways, Rimini Street Agentic UX is the product of a year-old partnership with ServiceNow. Rimini Street and ServiceNow have a broad partnership to use the Now Platform to enable AI agents to run on legacy infrastructure. ServiceNow and Rimini Street formed a partnership in late 2024 designed to move processes forward with AI and now the two companies have 26 joint pilots underway.

• ServiceNow launches AIx as AI becomes the platform UI
• CCE 2025: AI agents: Dreams, reality and what's next
• AI agents, automation, process mining starting to converge
• Agentic AI: Is it really just about UX disruption for now?
• Lessons from early AI agent efforts so far

Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin laid out the company's strategy. Rimini Street generates more than $400 million in recurring revenue, serves clients with two-minute response times or less and has a diverse customer base that's more than 50% international.

Ravin's case for Rimini Street revolves around evolving from providing maintenance and support for various enterprise systems to enabling AI. Rimini Street today supports legacy systems such as SAP, Oracle, Dayforce and VMware as well as SaaS applications including Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow and multiple open-source databases. Going forward, Rimini Street is looking to build on that support and make enterprise AI deliver returns.

"Think of us as AI for the real world. We're the guys who are helping to drive down costs. We're helping to automate processes, streamline businesses and drive #1 problem of every single company we work with, profits," said Ravin.

Ravin argued that boards of directors globally are mandating AI and transformation but also cutting budgets. "How do I make ends meet?" asked Ravin. "CIOs wander out of these meetings punch drunk."

The needle CIOs need to thread is innovation vs. cost cutting. Integration of systems is also a big issue. "We have all these great systems now. The problem is they really don't work together. You've probably heard they're all integrated and there's all these integration tools. It's just not the case. In most organizations, these systems are still very separate," said Ravin, who said every vendor wants customers on the latest release and "CIOs literally cannot do it all."

Ravin estimated that about 9% of the average budget is spent on innovation. "This is a formula for disaster in the long term," he said.

ERP at its technical limits

Rimini Street's Ravin said "we believe that ERP software is reaching its technical limitation."

The company will support ERP for years and decades, but a transition to an AI paradigm is coming. "We believe agentic AI is going to be the downfall of the software we see in the world today and it's happening fast," said Ravin.

Rimini Street Agentic UX is designed to be a simplified window into ERP systems.

And Rimini Street certainly has the installed base to prove its Agentic UX approach will work. Rimini Street manages the ERP systems across automaker Hyundai. The company also serves companies such as Catalyst Brands, which has rolled up companies such Aeropostale, JCPenney, Eddie Bauer, Lucky, Nautica and Brooks Brothers, and KnitWell, a private company that owns eight apparel brands including Ann Taylor, LOFT, Talbots and Chicos. Catalyst and KnitWell each have a handful of ERP systems to roll up. Agentic UX could give these companies an exit ramp to ERP consolidation and upgrades.

Todd Treonze, VP Integration and Corporate Systems at Catalyst Brands, said his company launched a year ago with multiple brands on their own ERP systems. Catalyst Brands consolidated support and maintenance and now plans to build on top of them as systems of records. "I think that there's a really big future opportunity for us here, to reinvest some of the savings we're seeing at the support level and put into the innovation side of the business," said Treonze.

It's a similar story for KnitWell.

"An ERP platform is almost the perfect platform to put agentic AI on top of it. It is well structured. The data underneath is also well structured. And it's all around business rules. There is no easier use case to automate with Agentic AI," said Jaap van Riel, CTO of KnitWell "I really hope I never have to upgrade an ERP in my life again. It's not good for my sleep, and it's not good for kind of the P&L either."

Now this phase out of ERP software as the work interface will take time. Ravin said the reality is that transitions in the enterprise must be orderly and there are processes to consider.

For enterprises to find money for innovation, they'll need to run those ERP processes well. However, don't confuse ERP processes for ERP software.

"We believe we could take 40% of the labor cost out of running the processes that run a business or government agency. That is monumental in terms of driving bottom line profits, streamlining operations and leapfrogging over the competitors with technology. This is what AI can do in the real world, in ERP and transactions," said Ravin.

Ravin's pitch is something we're hearing anecdotally from customers and vendors. The reality is that AI is changing the enterprise technology cycle to one that revolves around more efficient processes and use cases. The software matters, but optimized processes matter more.

The game will revolve around abstracting ERP software away so you can focus on the process.

The long AI game (sped up)

CIOs will need to realize it's a long game. AI agents will require governance, protocols and orchestration. Processes will be retooled.

"There are a lot of questions. We still have a lot of things to do. This is not all baked yet," said Ravin. "You have to recognize we're in the middle part of this inning in getting the technology figured out and then deployed in the real world. That's why we keep focusing on process, not the software."

To Ravin, enterprises will need to focus on process over software because "we don't have years to change."

Enterprises will need to think through the 10 processes that run businesses. Rimini Street's plan is to help enterprises extract the processes out of the ERP software.

"We are going to extract these processes out of the ERP software and move them up into the Agentic AI ERP like it's surgery. And eventually, eventually, there won't be a need for the underlying software anymore. Because we will have moved piece by piece over time, from one paradigm of technology to another," said Ravin. "Their tools, our know-how, our knowledge, our ability to go to market with credibility because we know these processes. We'll just put the new technology right over the top. We won't take the risk of ripping and replacing your massive global system. We then will move pieces one at a time."

Rimini Street's portfolio includes methodology called Smart Path, which revolves around a gradual move to a process-driven system and out of the ERP software game.

Vijay Kumar, Chief Innovation Officer at Rimini Street, Smart Path revolves around providing a foundation and roadmap to move to agentic AI ERP. Core tenents include:

• Use legacy ERP systems for what they're good at: Data.
• Layer a framework on top of it with Agentic UX.
• Leverage an architecture that is headless. "We're going to keep the SAP systems the way they are. We're going to preserve the data, the customizations and a lot of the work that customers have done," said Kumar. "What we're doing is really modernizing the front end of it, adding AI agents, which is absolutely critical, improving the UX, and finally being able to automate."
• Be prepared to evolve architecture since it's early in the AI game.

Rimini Street reckons it can get enterprises to a pilot in 30 days. Kumar said the ideal customer is one that has complex workflows, manual workflows and things that are hard to automate. The end state may feature agentic AI ERP apps to handle processes and use cases. "Once we start building credibility app by app, use case by use case, we're going to layer agentic AI across the enterprise," said Kumar.