Oracle Buys RightNow

I found out about Oracle’s purchase of RightNow, a multi-channel contact center company, when Chris Kanarkus of IDG News rang my cell.  Ironically, I was sitting in the departure area waiting for a flight that will take me to the RightNow Summit, the annual user meeting which is being held in Colorado Springs at the [...]

Oracle Beefs Up Its “Service Cloud”

Oracle announced it has entered into an agreement to purchase InQuira today.  InQuira is a privately held company that supplies knowledge management technology to support web self-service and agent assisted self-service. On the face of it, this seems to emulate solutions provided by RightNow and Salesforce.com and several other vendors in the customer service space.  [...]

Next year is a strategic opportunity

Recessions are always a good time to rebuild your competitive infrastructure and the slow growth/recession of the last couple of years has been no exception.  On the stock market, the technology sector seems to be doing quite well.  After bottoming in the middle of the summer the software companies especially seem to be rebounding.  Microsoft, [...]

RightNow Technologies Turns a Corner

RightNow Technologies certainly has come a long way in the last ten years and the company used its industry influencers day in Colorado Springs this week to remind us.  I saw the day as a marker of a turning point in the company’s development, a time when it said to the world, the first phase [...]

Sage SalesLogix for the cloud: The return of ASP

Perhaps the most interesting CRM development to come out of Denver this week was Sage’s unveiling of its SaaS or cloud offering.  But now that the initial hoopla has died down (mine included) it’s time to take a more measured look at what is being delivered. As I mentioned in an earlier post on my [...]

IBM, Cast Iron tie the knot

IBM bought Cast Iron Systems for what looks like an undisclosed amount of cash today.  That’s big news if you are an AppExchange product vendor specializing in integrating with legacy systems like ERP and some CRM.  Cast Iron has been the g-to company for effecting these integrations and grew prosperous doing them. That IBM saw [...]

Forecasting the year ahead

Am I kidding me?  Forecasting the year ahead?  Sheesh! One of the reasons the task I set for myself is so daunting this year is that I believe we are in a massive transition state that affects the whole economy, CRM included.  I think Tom Friedman got it right in version 2.0 of his “Hot, [...]

On the road (again)

Colorado Springs is an interesting place.  Despite the name there are no “springs” it’s an arid place in a valley surrounded by the southern Rocky Mountains and Pikes Peak National Park (for sticklers Pikes really should be Pike’s but the official U.S. naming convention eliminates the apostrophe).  The springs were an invention of the railroads [...]