Oracle MightNow FightNow with RightNow

So Oracle have bought RightNow. Ahh, RightNow. Memories. See my proud certificate to become RightNow certified. Not many people can say that. The RightNow approach to wooing partners to implement their product was far removed from Salesforce.com, possibly explaining why it is seen as more of a niche product with not much of a partner ecosystem.

My experience in 2008 was one of being an extension to their in house Professional Services at the Euro HQ in Maidenhead. The training I was given by the PS guys there was second to none, and it was clear there was a passion not only for the product, but for 'best practice' in implementation. To this day I have never received better training in a product.

From a technical point of view, having come from a Siebel background, the thing that struck me was the speed of configuration (and of course 'no hardware'). In a similar way to Salesforce, UI and data model changes were very fast to implement. There were also very powerful routing, escalation and knowledge base elements too. The best way I can describe it is a set of service contact centre building blocks, with rafts of 'configuration settings' to turn functionality on and off. This, as opposed to the 'prettified database tables but not much else' approach of some apps. What this resulted in was incredible value, incredibly fast. The whole application, including web knowledge base could be set up in as little as a week or two. Longer timelines would apply for integration/migration etc as usual, but that takes the same amount of time regardless of SaaS/On-Premise/Cloud/whatever.

When compared to Salesforce, Oracle CRM OnDemand or Siebel, the Service functionality RightNow had back THEN was superior to what those platforms have in this area NOW. It frustrates me when certain products are hell-bent on bells-and-whistles before they have got the basics right. Get the internals of routing/knowledgebase/escalation/workload management etc right FIRST, then dabble with Twitter and Facebook. Or you could just do nothing. Ever. As per Siebel.

In 3 years since I last saw RightNow it will only have improved, so it is no surprise that Oracle have come in for them. Oracle CRM OnDemand is woeful in the Contact Centre area, Gartner do not even see it as a player. Salesforce charge separately for their Knowledgebase (crazy) and are somewhere over there in Social Fairyland (though they acquired Assistly which looks good), and I would need to ask my Grandad about Siebel.

What does confuse me though is what the next step for Oracle is. I would expect it to be an extension of their Fusion applications, but are they going to skin/integrate it as such or leave it as-is?  Kate Leggett has just done a great blog post on this topic, including an important point about the culture of the two companies. Oracle is a lumbering behemoth of a company, RightNow has been known as agile, friendly, well quite modern really. Cool. When I was there they had free cans of pop in the fridge. For instance.

What I can conclude, is that this is the first time Oracle have managed to position themselves with a superior offering to Salesforce in the SaaS space. You want an SFA solution? Go to Salesforce. You want an extendable enterprise platform? Go to Salesforce. You want a best practice, pre-built Customer Service Solution? Now at last you can consider going to Oracle.