Systems giant Oracle has announced its intention to acquire on-demand CRM provider RightNow Technologies for $1.5 billion.
The acquisition will mean Oracle has three separate hosted CRM offerings, alongside Oracle CRM On Demand and the cloud-hosted version of Fusion CRM. However, RightNow’s application has a customer service focus, whereas the other two are designed for salesforce automation.
"RightNow’s leading customer service cloud is a very important addition to Oracle’s public cloud," said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president for Oracle Development.
In July, RightNow reported a 26% year-on-year revenue increase for the second quarter of the financial year, up to $54.8 million. It is due to report its latest financial figures tomorrow.
Along with Salesforce.com and NetSuite, RightNow was one of the first well-known software-as-a-service companies. However, it was the only one not to have received investment from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, or to be run by a former Oracle executive.
Earlier this month, Oracle announced that its Fusion Apps range, the re-engineered suite of applications it has been working on since 2007, will be available as services hosted on its public cloud. However, it said that it will continue to offer CRM On Demand, which started life as Siebel’s reponse to Salesforce.com.
Information Age asked Oracle why it planned to offer two different hosted CRM services. Noel Coloe, applications sales development leader, replied saying that "this all comes down to customer choice. There is not an identical match in functionality between CRM On Demand and Fusion CRM, each product has some unique capabilities and functionality will evolve over time”
