"The market is not what it was before Larry Ellison got out of the software industry and into mergers and acquisitions," argues Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies, one of the pioneers of the on demand applications business. While in recent times Salesforce.com has become the poster child of the on demand movement, RightNow has many claims to be one of the shaping influencers in the sector.
Starting life seven years ago with two men in a spare bedroom, the company now has offices around the world, over 500 employees and has gone public. Last year, RightNow earned $61.8 million in total revenue and $47.8 million in gross profit against $35.9 million and $26.9 million in the previous year.
Gianforte has watched the recent turmoil in the market with interest, but seemingly with some detachment. He argues that the main players are not all working to the same definitions of the CRM sector. "Siebel has always been in enterprise customer service automation," he suggests, "whereas Salesforce.com is all about salesforce automation. We've been in on demand from day one. We are on demand software company and we serve high end enterprise customers.
"There's been a lot of disatisfaction with the CRM industry because so many companies took the money and ran. They generated a lot of hype and many of them started to believe it as well. Companies like Siebel weren’t really about managing the customer and helping to grow the customers business; they were all about growing their own business."
Gianforte argues that the major challenges to Oracle and Siebel will lie in their coming to terms with the idea of what the next generation of applications should look like. He says that while both companies talk about service oriented architectures, their "monolithic architectures" do not lend themselves towards such an evolution.
"If you really want to give customers the ability to mix-and-match best-in-class software functionality, then you need to break your solutions up into smaller, more digestible pieces that customers can deploy quickly to achieve rapid time-to-benefit and return on investment,”" he advises. "That’s what those of us who genuinely offer on demand solutions have been doing."
Gianforte is not optimistic about Oracle's prospects for succeeding with Fusion - and does not expect that the recent upheaval in the applications market is necessarily at an end. Consolidation is inevitable in any industry, he reckons, arguing that what customers will always look to is a proven track record and a safe pair of hands. These requirements, he adds, meet RightNow’s strategic direction nicely...
By Stuart Lauchlan
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