Startup Rimini Street, which provides maintenance and support for Siebel’s customer relationship management software, stole some thunder at Siebel’s North American conference Monday by launching services that could end up stealing some customers.

Among the announcements Rimini Street made at CustomerWorld in Boston was a new global support center and a new chief technology officer. Rimini Street is eyeing the large chunk of Siebel’s revenue which comes from its maintenance and support services. Last year, $852 million, or about 63 percent, of Siebel’s $1.34 billion in revenue came from professional services and maintenance.

Las Vegas-based Rimini Street has argued that customers could cut their maintenance and support costs by 50 percent if they use its services. Siebel did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Rimini Street appears to be preying on customer uncertainties over Siebel’s acquisition by Oracle, a $5.8-billion deal announced last month (see Oracle Buys Siebel for $5.8B). Customers are scrutinizing Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel products and its road map for Project Fusion—Oracle’s next-generation platform for business applications that will merge the technologies from its recent acquisitions such as PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and most recently, Siebel.

The first applications released through Project Fusion will come out before 2007.

Rimini Street, named by the founder after a street in Italy, was launched last month, around the time of Oracle’s OpenWorld user conference (see Oracle Ends Shopping Spree). CEO Seth Ravin and his team of about 15 employees made the announcement about a week after Oracle announced its plans to acquire Siebel.

“We thought it was important to announce the service early,” Mr. Ravin said. “With Oracle’s [Siebel] announcement coming out, customers would be concerned [about future support of Siebel products].”

Hunting for Customers

Rimini Street will roll out its products only in the first quarter of 2006, but is doing all it can to grab customers and get the word out.

The global support center the company announced is in Foster City, California, within walking distance to Siebel’s headquarters. About 15 people will run the center and the company is planning to open another one in Charlotte, North Carolina. That one is very close to Siebel’s East Coast support center, Mr. Ravin said.

The company also named Thomas Shay—an alum of Sun Microsystems where he oversaw all OEM (original equipment manufacturer) sales engineering in Asia Pacific—as its new CTO.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ravin is meeting with Siebel customers to discuss future prospects. He’s also working on forming a customer committee that will help Rimini Street design its service offering.

The efforts are paying off. “We are already talking with Fortune 500 customers, and the web traffic [on the company web site] has been very strong,” said Mr. Ravin.

Siebel has been taking the threat posed by Rimini Street seriously, he said. Mr. Ravin said Siebel has been sending legal notices saying the claims made by Rimini Street about providing Siebel support services are false and misleading.

“They are trying to create barriers for entry,” Mr. Ravin said. “We will take aggressive action and we will do what we have to do to clear the way.”

Mr. Ravin said he’s after a lucrative business.

“I think maintenance streams are the lifeblood of every major software company,” Mr. Ravin said. “Any loss of that revenue is substantial,” especially taking into consideration the trouble Siebel has been in recently.

‘Tremendous Potential’

Mr. Ravin, an ex-PeopleSoft employee, hails from Tomorrow Now, a third-party maintenance and support provider for PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products. The company was bought by German software giant SAP. Mr. Ravin was one of the key executives at Tomorrow Now but decided to start his own venture after the company was acquired by SAP.

Joshua Greenbaum, an analyst with EA Consulting, said Rimini Street has “tremendous potential” to take Siebel customers, but it was too early to tell right now.

“They need a lot of customers who are interested in staying with Siebel (software) but not necessarily with Oracle,” Mr. Greenbaum said.

At CustomerWorld, Siebel made several product announcements including the launch of Siebel Business Analytics 7.8, its business intelligence product and the Siebel Component Assembly for Microsoft’s .Net framework designed to help customers accelerate the development of custom CRM applications.

Except for a brief television appearance of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, there was no sign of Oracle.

“It has to do with the passive-aggressive culture at Siebel,” said Bruce Daley, editor of the Siebel Observer, who is now launching a publication called the Enterprise Software Observer. “[Siebel] is going to be like an independent company.”

Mr. Daley said Siebel and Oracle executives are “still taking shots at each other until the midnight of the day the deal is done.” The acquisition of Siebel by Oracle is still pending regulatory approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Meanwhile, Oracle rival SAP made a countermove Monday by announcing the extension of its Safe Passage program to Siebel applications. The program was launched in January to help customers of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Retek transition to SAP software. SAP was trying to capitalize on the uncertainty faced by customers regarding the lifetime of their software investments after Oracle bought these companies.