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Ellison conitues bumping Benioff: Oracle buys RightNow CRM
October 25, 2011 | Author: Sandeep Sharma
As you probably remember, recently Oracle's boss Larry Ellison decided to give a lesson to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff for his attacks on Oracle. At the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference Ellison not only banned Benioff in the event program but also announced the public cloud platform Oracle Public Cloud, which will provide either PaaS or SaaS services, including CRM (ie, will compete directly with Salesforce CRM / Force.com). However, it was shown only on the presentetion slides and Benioff had every reason to just joke at Ellison in his Twitter and sleep peacefully. But today, the Oracle's threat has become very real: Oracle for $1.5 billion has acquired RightNow, one of the leading SaaS CRM vendors.
Although, to be more precise, RightNow prefers to call its solution not CRM (Customer Relationship Management) but CEM (Customer Experience Management). How CEM differs from CRM - read here. RightNow CEM includes the customer web-service system, social tools and the solution for Call-Centers. And except the client system, RightNow has built the CEM-platform that allows to expand and integrate the base system - i.e. very similar to Salesforce.
Recall that Oracle's own SaaS CRM system - Oracle CRM OnDemand has been trying to compete with Salesforce for a long time, but it hasn't achieved much success.
See also: Top 10 Online CRM software
