Stories about: RightNow Technologies

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled the latest version of its Dynamics CRM (customer-relationship-management) software, which adds some social software functionality as well as closer ties to the Office 365 online productivity suite.

Software giant Oracle is acquiring RightNow Technologies Inc. for $43 a share, or a total of about $1.5 billion, to expand its Internet-based offerings and offer a challenge to customer relationship management powerhouse Salesforce.com.

Oracle is buying RightNow Technologies for about US$1.5 billion in order to boost its recently announced Public Cloud with customer-service software, the companies announced Monday. The deal is expected to close late this year or in early 2012.

About 20 months ago, Charming Shoppes launched a customer insights project to "deliver actionable customer and market research and analysis to the business," says Jeffrey Liss, who headed up the initiative. Liss is now senior vice president of corporate strategy at the plus-size women's clothing retailer, which includes Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug and Catherines stores.

When VMware announced last week that it would loosen the radical change in price structure it announced only a month ago, it was doing more than mollifying a few disgruntled customers. It was responding to a revolt among customers, analysts say, even at large companies that rarely considered competing virtualization platforms due to VMware's lead in the technology.

On the heels of the controversial Amazon EC2 cloud outage last week, research firm Forrester published a timely report on the growth potential of the major public cloud categories.

Tough economic times, and the availability of more software licensing models than ever before, have combined to shift more negotiating power into customers' hands.

RightNow On Demand Customer Relationship Management Improves Agent Effectiveness and Allows Customers to Help Themselves

The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) is increasingly turning to social media tools and virtual environments to attract students and improve its services.

The tasks in Laef Olson’s working hours can be rather varied. Olson, who is the CIO at Software-as-a-Service vendor RightNow Technologies is on the one hand responsible for IT security and the organisation’s information systems, while on the other he spruiks the strategy and vision for the company's on-demand hosting platform. On many occasions Olson gets a direct audience with company CIOs. What makes it easier for Olson to get traction to the upper levels of management is his past. He has been group vice president of global technology operations of Travelport and Orbitz Worldwide. And before that CTO of cars.com. In these roles he was also a consumer of SaaS products. It is that experience that he uses to relate to customers when on the road. Olson briefly stopped over in Australia last month where CIO Magazine asked him about the maturity of SaaS.