Kevin Purcell

Kevin Purcell’s journey to Rimini Street is a story of global experience and a passion for building organisations that make a difference. 

As Senior Vice President for Global Partners, Alliances and Channels, Kevin brings decades of expertise spanning software, infrastructure and security to a company that has quietly become a disruptor in the enterprise software support market.

For Kevin, the appeal of Rimini Street is clear. “I love to build things,” he says. “When I look at building something for a company that is just looking to get into a new area so they can scale and to grow the business, I have a lot of satisfaction contributing to the company's success.”

Kevin joined Rimini Street in late 2024, applying his breadth of experience and a passion for building high-performing organisations to his new role.

At Rimini Street, Kevin is responsible for building and scaling the company’s global partner, alliance and channel ecosystem. His remit is broad: from forging strategic alliances with technology leaders and value-added resellers, to developing partnerships with managed service providers, consulting firms and specialists in business transformation. 

“Partnerships are a great way to scale a business,” Kevin notes. “That’s where a lot of my experience comes from.”

Rimini Street itself is a pioneer in the third-party support market. 

Over the past two decades, the company has signed more than 5,900 contracts worldwide, saving clients more than US$9bn in total.

Its primary support engineers’ experience matches the tenure of the company, averaging more than 20 years of experience — and the company boasts a 4.9 out of 5 client satisfaction rating. 

With offices in more than 30 countries and support for more than 600 software applications — including SAP, Oracle and VMware — Rimini Street is the epitome of a global operation.

This is where Kevin comes in as Senior Vice President for Global Partners, Alliances and Channels. His role centres on leveraging this foundation and taking Rimini Street’s message of optionality — “providing options for companies that are looking for options around driving costs down and transforming their business,” as Kevin defines — to new markets and industries. 

In an enterprise software landscape dominated by vendors pushing customers toward costly cloud migrations and subscription models, Rimini Street offers an alternative: long-term support for existing systems, enabling organisations to avoid forced upgrades and maintain control over their IT roadmaps. 

“Our customers are looking for options,” Kevin declares. “They don’t want to be locked into a vendor, and that’s what optionality means.”

This philosophy of optionality is central to both Kevin’s work and Rimini Street’s identity.

“We’re actually providing a better service at a lower cost, which to me is a very strong value proposition for customers,” he continues. 

By supporting legacy systems and offering a credible, lower-cost alternative to vendor support, Rimini Street empowers organisations to make technology decisions on their own terms.

Providing this service does not come without its challenges, however.

Building a partner-led business can help companies scale and provide more awareness about our approach and portfolio in the marketplace. Internally, Kevin says, a cultural shift is required: sellers need to trust and know how to work with partners. Externally, the challenge is often overcoming what he calls the “human factor” — the perception that only the original vendor can provide the best support. 

“Many customers need to flip the switch,” Kevin explains. “Why would you get better service if you’re not the enterprise software vendor? That’s something that a lot of customers, because of the human factor in my opinion, need to work through and process.

“We can actually provide better support than the vendor can.”

This is something that can not only be observed across Rimini Street’s two decades of operations, but in the months since Kevin joined the company.

In his short time at Rimini Street, he has already overseen the signing of numerous new partnerships, including with ServiceNow and Merlin Cyber, and continues to expand the company’s reach. 

“We’re really proud over the last six months we’ve signed numerous partnerships and there’s still so much work to do going forward,” he says.

As Rimini Street looks to the future, Kevin’s leadership and global perspective will be central to its mission of redefining value in enterprise IT. 

“We want to be known as the company that can provide that optionality,” he says.

To read the full article in the magazine, click HERE.