Oracle buys RightNow for roughly $US1.5 billion

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.

While RightNow has sold cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) applications, Oracle already has such offerings. But of late, RightNow has repositioned itself as a "customer experience management" provider, focused more on helping companies improve customer support in call centers, social media sites and the web, rather than just tracking sales cycles.

To that end, Oracle's move is a direct hit against rival Salesforce.com, which added customer-service capabilities with the 2008 acquisition of Instranet and has embarked on a broad strategy centered on tying enterprises to the social web.

In a presentation released Monday, Oracle described how RightNow's products will work as part of a continuum involving its Siebel marketing software, ATG Commerce e-commerce platform, supply-chain applications and Endeca unstructured data search technology, the last of which is part of a pending acquisition announced only last week.

All told, the combination will help companies gain new customers and keep them longer while lowering operational costs, Oracle said in a statement.

The presentation provided some examples of the benefits RightNow customers have gained. Some 40 percent of RealNetworks' customers now resolve issues online, without dealing with a service representative, while call-handling times for Overstock.com have fallen 25 percent, it states.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

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