RightNow Cloud Service Agreement: Industry milestone or clever stunt?

Posted by Martin Banks in Technology on Tue, 09/03/2010 - 12:05

Is RightNow Technologies' new Cloud customer service agreement a defining moment for the Cloud sector and CRM pricing - or a big publicity stunt? Martin Banks of BusinessCloud9 explores.

 

Last week’s announcement by RightNow of new contract terms  – and the implicit gauntlet the announcement threw down at the feet of the rest of the service provider community – arguably marks an important transition point for the business. It can be seen as a point where it starts to accept that it is a real business. On that basis it now has to bear up to some deeper scrutiny. 

Part of that process is the question of whether it is just a good `PR Stunt’. That is a perfectly appropriate tactic, of course, and poking a generally perceived weak point like contract terms can be a good target for such an approach. In practice, the change announced by CEO Greg Gianforte is more than that. But it would also be easy to over-emphasise its impact when that will vary depending upon the actual services provided.
 
With that in mind it seems that RightNow’s new contract is a Curate’s Egg – good in parts. Gianforte called it a revolution, which is taking things a little far. As an evolution however, it definitely has its place in pushing the service provision business into being business-like.

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