November 19th, 2009

How FinancialForce crushes it in SaaS accounting

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 8:32 am

Categories: saas

Tags: Accounting, Software-as-a-service, Software As A Service (SaaS), Operational Accounting, Financial Services, Managed Hosting, Emerging Technologies, Finance, Dennis Howlett

Brian Sommer does an excellent job of explaining how the move to SaaS is working for the ‘new kidz on the block’ trying to displace incumbent ERP vendors. I’m interested in the accounting end of the market. It’s the one area where SAP, Oracle, Sage, Infor, Lawson and Microsoft have felt comparatively safe. The argument goes that no CXO is going to move their transaction data into the internet cloud and therefore they can continue to milk their customers for maintenance dollars at usurious rates for at least the next five/ten years. There’s a ring of truth in that.

The on-premise vendors have done a terrific job creating the kind of FUD that will keep many a CFO wary about perceived security issues. But then those same vendors forget that many if not all companies make at least some passing use of the internet and that individuals increasingly use services like online banking, share their data via PayPal and what not.

Where the SaaS vendor miss a trick is in asking buyers what is so sacred about back office accounting data. Surely sales opportunity data a la Salesforce.com is far more valuable yet now we see Salesforce.com hit the $1.3 billion revenue run rate, servicing 67,900 customers.

Yesterday I sat in on a FinancialForce.com early adopter panel. Let’s be clear - none of these companies have been through a full accounting cycle so we cannot be sure they’re going to be as happy in say a year’s time as they claim today. Nevertheless, what was unusual is that all the panelists on show are making accounting sound interesting. When was the last time you heard that?

Even more unusual is that fact that at least in one case (Quattro - see above video) the company on display makes SaaS sound as natural as taking an early morning shower. It’s just something you do. In this case, we’re talking about a startup where you’d expect the company to take an alternative view of the world but what about established businesses that are in the risk business? Here I was impressed by The Compliance Team Inc which talked about hard benefits - like 9% reduction in billing cycle times. Or Live Out Loud which talked about the ability to naturally reduce headcount from eliminating data matching and rekeying. These are not soft but measurable bottom line benefits you simply cannot get from an on-premise solution.

The most striking thing came in the Q&A. What about GAAP reporting? Not an issue. How about multi-currency? Got it. Projects? Yep…and on and on. One company has gone so far as to build their own payroll system using the Force.com. To use geek speak - that’s sick. Whoever did that in the past?

So what of the future? Economic vigor comes from the startups, visionaries and innovators. Where do you think they’re going to go a-looking for their accounting?

October 12th, 2009

SaaS Customer Bill of Rights: right thing, right time

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 2:42 pm

Categories: saas

Tags: Software-as-a-service, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, Dennis Howlett

AG Customer Bill of Rights - SaaS - Live I’m not pimping this because Ray Wang and I happen to be collaborators or that I got a credit in the Altimeter Group report but because Ray and Jeremiah Owyang’s SaaS Customer Bill of Rights is the right thing at the right time.

It is complementary and additive to Phil Wainewright’s earlier work on this topic from the vendor position and comes just at a time when Microsoft is taking a battering for the Sidekick fiasco while Phil is documenting still more ‘amateur’ dramatics:

As I’ve often written in the past, big, established companies frequently over-estimate their competence at cloud computing and SaaS, simply because they fail to realize it’s far more than just a repackaging of what they already do. Unfortunately, their inability to grasp the emerging as-a-service business model and the demands of cloud-scale computing leave them performing like amateurs. The pity of it is, their arrogance and incompetence undermines trust in all cloud computing providers, even those that take their responsibilities seriously.

I could say exactly the same thing about slack attention to access controls in the SME SaaS space where today it really is the Wild West for open APIs. That’s more a lack of maturity in thinking though something that needs to be addressed more generally.

As an aside, I’ve seen plenty of people poo-poo’ing SAP’s as yet anemic cloud efforts with Business ByDesign. Given recent events and what both Phil and Ray are saying: would anyone prefer they didn’t do more work before unleashing the marketing machine? They are after all the archetypal legacy player trying to figure out SaaS.  Just sayin’…

September 30th, 2009

Salesforce.com and CODA hook up

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 3:18 am

Categories: Enterprise applications, saas

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., CODA, FinancialForce.com, Sales Force Management, Sales, Dennis Howlett

Salesforce.com and CODA (via its parent Unit 4 Agresso) are hooking up to create FinancialForce.com. While financial details of the arrangement were not revealed, Salesforce.com is a minority stakeholder in the new company. From the blurbs:

The CODA 2go team and products have transferred to FinancialForce.com, which will be run from the company’s new corporate headquarters in San Mateo, California as well as from its EMEA headquarters in Harrogate in the UK. FinancialForce.com already has established sales, pre-sales and support teams in North America and the UK to take the new solution to market. Salesforce.com will provide first line support for FinancialForce.com, giving customers of both Salesforce CRM and FinancialForce applications a single consistent point of contact.

At first blush this looks like a marketing play by both companies but there is more to this than meets the eye.

From Salesforce.com’s perspective it can now claim kudos for extending itself to look more like NetSuite. From CODA’s perspective, it gets more development klout inside the Salesforce.com gravity field while benefiting from the Salesforce.com marketing halo.

I spoke with Jeremy Roche, who now becomes CEO of FinancialForce.com as well as retaining his leadership role with CODA: “We represent the biggest development on the Force.com platform and see ourselves as a driving force there. We are for instance providing Salesforce.com with experience in scaling up for example in using the batch Apex feature for providing manipulations in bulk revaluations.”

Asked about the go to market angle, Jeremy said: “There’s no question that being permitted to carry the Force.com name makes a difference but we expect this will give us more ways to go to market than are readily available today. Having the credibility of the Force.com behind us makes a difference in what are really new markets where CODA is not so well known.”

We then discussed what this means in the real world to which Jeremy replied: “Software as a service opens up revenue streams that are just not available in the on-prem world so for instance we are discovering that some customers wish to use as financial middleware. They use Salesforce.com as their main way of doing business and we both record and expose the debits and credits. An example might be where customers are using the Service Cloud and need financial information on contract renewal.”

Technical buyers will be interested in knowing who owns what and how it all fits together. According to Jeremy, FinancialForce.com uses the Salesforce.com master data model and then extends it: “As you know, some data for say ‘customer’ is common but we need other things that Salesforce.com would not provide like knowing which part of the chart of accounts a customer fits into. That’s where we extend without interfering with the master.”

As the service grows, it will be interesting to see how the two companies manage reporting, an issue I know is on the mind of Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris: “We make use of Salesforce.com’s reporting and dashboarding but some companies are looking for corporate performance reporting style information. For that we currently link to Ucalc but also provide a web service driven interface for Excel because that’s what the accountants want. We can manipulate in cubes anyway as CODA2go is built on that premise so we get a lot of slice and dice but no, it doesn’t do everything we want today. It will come,” said Jeremy.

Disclosure: CODA2go is a sponsor to my personal weblog

September 11th, 2009

SAP and SME's: an update

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 7:23 am

Categories: ERP, Enterprise applications, saas

Tags: Small And Medium Enterprise, SAP AG, Smb/Sme, Dennis Howlett

I’ve just returned from spending a day immersed in SAP at a London hotel with European and South African SME customers, channel partners and the Business ByDesign team. It’s been fascinating. While the focus was on ByDesign, I met with All-In-One customers. It provided a useful comparison in how customers are looking at the two solutions. Some of my analyst colleagues were a bit grumpy at the thought that ByDesign is still progressing at what seems a snail’s pace but my take is that at least some of them miss the important points. I’ll get to that.

One of the real surprises to me is that despite the fact SAP gets more than its fair share of negative press, its brand recognition and value is much higher in the SME marketplace than almost all other solutions. While any number of competitors might be on a short list, SAP is becoming one of the choices that a certain type of customer will frequently have on their short list. That confirms for me something I already know and which Vinnie Mirchandani reminds us of from time to time: press and analysts are only one point in the decision chain. We’re not as important as we’d like to think - at least not in the decision making process.

However, SAP doesn’t know how to make that SME story as effectively as it could. How often for instance do you hear SME success stories except in canned, legally immolated press releases? Its large company and technically driven mind set doesn’t allow it to make best use of this class of customer. As a result, I don’t think it really gets the bang per marketing buck that it could.

Contrary to popular belief, SAP doesn’t have to be the cost sink that many SME’s believe. I discussed TCO with an All-In-One customer who has managed to get the amortized cost down to $1,700 per user per annum for a 50 user system. Others may argue that is still too much but it is comparable with a similar number of users running Business ByDesign at current list prices. Some might say that’s still too much but then a lot depends on what you think you’re getting on the ROI side of the equation because that’s where the numbers start to make real sense. Even so, SAP needs to do a much better job for the channel. A consistent groan is that SAP’s perceived cost still frightens away a lot of board level decision makers even when it is the preferred technical choice.

While we were there, Infoworld published a story titled: SAP: Still no ship date for long-promised small business ERP suite where it claims that Bill McDermott, SAP’s head of sales said:

“When this product hits the market, we won’t have to do a lot of talking,” he said. “The product and market will do the talking for us.”

This implies the product is NOT in the market., something its competitors would like people to believe. During our conversation, Rainer Zinow, SVP ByDesign said that ByDesign IS generally available. That implies you can buy it. That is not quite true in terms that we usually understand it but indicative of the fact SAP has not managed to get its market messaging ducks in a row. Here’s the reality:

• Yes, you can buy it - I’ve met ByDesign customers who are in production on the service.
• Yes, SAP has scaled back its marketing efforts for this product line significantly.
• No, you can’t just walk up to SAP and get it. SAP has 45 reference customers and wants to reach 100 reference sites before hitting the marketing and selling gas pedal. It therefore qualifies in the kind of customer it wants during this slow burn phase.
• Yes - SAP still has technical issues with the service that keep its TCO higher than where it wants to be but that is improving.
• Yes - the product is getting better. The release of FP2 shows significant enhancements, the GUI looks great and screen performance, even on poor networks is impressive. It is a world apart from where they were when ByDesign was originally launched and should be a strong contender.
• Yes - saas purists will argue that ByDesign isn’t a ‘proper’ multi-tenant offering and therefore unlikely to succeed. Many of those same commenters have a poor understanding about what ByDesign is trying to achieve. Neither do they appreciate the complexities or requirements of customers who might be attracted to the service. As Zinow said: “Customers say you can have as many tenants as you want but I only want my stuff on my blade.” Having said that, SAP has not done a good job virtualizing the overall service and that creates a welter of practical problems it still needs to overcome such that ByDesign meets SAP’s margin targets. They will get there.
• Yes - SAP still has to work out its channel strategy. BusinessOne channel partners take one look, see potential and think: ‘How do we make money off of this?’ SAP is in process of developing an SDK so that partners can create add-ons but that won’t be available for at least a year. In the meantime, the channel is going to need re-educating about what it means to sell SAP. The days of mega buck consulting for SME’s are done but value based work is a play that could differentiate the consultant of the future.
• Yes - there can be some confusion around where SAP positions BusinessOne, ByDesign and All-In-One solutions. There are overlaps and each has its strengths but each has a clearly defined market. The messages that attach to each need carefully articulating to both potential customers and partners. That has yet to become obvious.
• Yes - ByDesign is setting a benchmark for what it means to acquire, configure, implement and run 21st century software and that will, in the long term, impact all of SAP’s product and service lines as well as the ecosystem. However, I believe the market is so large for what they are attempting to do in this segment that naysayers will end up eating their own words. The fact ByDesign (and to a lesser extent All-In-One) is reaching many more users in an organization than the Business Suite should be telling SAP and its detractors something.
• SAP has had so many technical issues with ByDesign that the market has pretty much decided it is a negative only story. It is difficult for SAP to get a positive message out into the market. McDermott’s bluster isn’t helpful because no software vendor has an implied right to success.

Having read all of that, some readers must be wondering if I ended up on some sort of proprietary SAP crack or was somehow dazzled by SAP’s hospitality. No. As I’ve always said, customers speak far louder than anything I, any analyst, partner or the company can say. Those are the people I am listening to.

As a final note, I shot some video and over the coming days will put these up so that readers can judge for themselves what customers are saying.

Updated for short video of Rainer Zinow

June 10th, 2009

European SaaS vendors: not quite comfortable in their skins

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 2:48 pm

Categories: saas

Tags: Google Inc., Industry, Retail, Strategy, Channel Management, Management, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

This week in Amsterdam, our own Phil Wainewright was compering and moderating panels for the annual SIIA On Demand conference. If you’ve not met Phil he is the overseas person’s image of the ‘perfect English gentleman.’ He did a great job herding the cats aka the saas industry’s spokepeople and sponsors. Joking aside, Phil masterfully asked the kinds of question we all want answered. Referring to the freemium model, Phil asked: “How do you convince someone that a free application is worth more than nothing? I’m not sure I trust something I don’t pay for.” The question was directed at a thoughtful open source provider.

SIIA is the industry talking to itself. Not quite a circle jerk. There was almost no evidence of the vendors declaring triumphant victory. Instead we saw a steady procession of sometimes divergent views, all received respectfully and thoughtfully by the largely European audience.

The tone was set by Zack Nelson, CEO Netsuite invoking lessons learned from Netsuite’s saas experience to illustrate how the VAR business model has to respond to changes in the market or, quite literally die. I’m skeptical whether the traditional VARs and SIs really understand this market. I still hear srtories of consultants feverishly punching calculators as they try figure what 10x of nothing really is.

Google’s announcement that it’s tying itself to Outlook served as a perfect backdrop for Marcello Cordioli, CIO of Permasteelisa no holds barred discussion if his company’s Google Apps deployment to some 4,000 people. Citng the need to eliminate disaster recovery costs while maintaining security, Mr Cordioli was not shy of critiquing Google: ‘Labels and conversations are difficult to digest, you have to invest in training and education so that people can understand the differences between the way Google works and Outlook.” That of course may now be a thing of the past, but in the corridors I heard about companies that are already calculating the potential cost in Exchange Servers and thinking about how they’ll negotiate the Google headline price of $40 per user per annum for even modest numbers of users. That’s what I call innovation.

And then you have John Wookey’s announcement of SAP’s saas plans. Confused or not, it speaks volumes that SAP chose to make the public announcement to the industry itself. It was greeted with muted acceptance with some muttering that it was defensive while others immediately thought ‘cost.’

This is an industry that recognizes its youth. It understands the game is already changing and that even where there is a lot innovation, you’ve just got to keep moving. Having integration on the menu with Annrai O’Toole, Workday’s CTO, also speaks to real world issues of ‘loosely joined’ in the internet cloud applications space.

Overall this was a thoroughly enjoyable conference. Apart from the general speaker quality - which was excellent - there was a real sense that saas is maturing and that vendors are taking this next step - whatever that might mean- very seriously indeed. But above everything, the sense that the IT industry is on the cusp of a fundamental shift was rarely far from my thoughts.

It is refreshing to see companies, some of which are in open competition, intelligently debating the issues that matter to vendors but which have clear implications for users. Such as - what DO you do about funding in the current environment? I must admit to almost no sympathy for the VC panel which was touting for business but only had four possible takers out of a room of some 140 people. My how times have changed.

I understand the event was videod and sessions will be made available on one of the popular streaming channels.

June 10th, 2009

Zach Nelson: Optical problems for saas VARs

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 4:59 am

Categories: Enterprise applications, saas

Tags: Zach Nelson, Value-added Reseller, Retail, Channel Management, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

Zach Nelson, CEO of Netsuite used SIIA Europe as a platform for setting out his vision of the VAR market. Using a Microsoft example, he said that while the traditional one to three times license revenue might look fine in the on premise world, it doesn’t work the same way in the on-demand world:

“VARs are going to have to change their business model or go out of business. They have a math problem they need to solve. Great Plains has licence up front of $529k. Then the VAR gets one to three times as much to implement, so that’s up to $1.59 million. NetSuite you pay $176k subscription per year. If I charge you that, can I charge you $1.59 million for services? No way. So the challenge for VARs becomes how I reduce the cost by 10x.”

Nelson’s solution is to turn the on demand model on its head. Instead of ’software as a service’ he proposes that VARs adopt the idea of ’services as software.’ By this he means that VARs should concentrate on building methodologies that allow them to resell implementations and vertical market offerings,  maling money on incremental sales.

That’s fine and is in line with calls to reduce large scale project implementations but is it viable? Nelson operates Netsuite’s services organization at zero profit. That makes it difficult for VARs to compete. Also, the notion that VARs should price based on a figure the vendor is able to achieve says nothing about value delivered. “We’re at the very early stages of working this out. RIght now we’re seeing price pressure but the models themselves have not emerged. But…the idea you can build a solution that you can resell over and over should mean VARs make money. They’ve got to get used to the idea of deferred gratitude.”

Nelson agreed that his company will need to work more closely with VARs so that the VARs have a better opportunity to tap into Netsuite’s marketing. “We all need to get a lot closer to each other but it’s got to be so our customers benefit.”

April 8th, 2009

Phil Wainewright: the European SaaS market

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 12:21 am

Categories: saas

Tags: Corporate Communications, Scripting Languages, Leadership, Marketing, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Management, Dennis Howlett

While at Cloudforce, I met with our own Phil Wainewright. Regular ZDNet readers will know Phil has built up a solid reputation as a leading analyst in the saas/on-demand space. I wanted to get his views on the emergent European saas market.

The key point to understand from the video is that there is a diverse, growing and vibrant European saas developer community that has learned from the mistakes of the ASP past. There are some surprises in Phil’s discussion: for example, France is proving itself as an early and active adopter of saas technologies.

A demonstration of that confidence comes in Phil’s leadership in developing the upcoming SIIA European conference.

March 25th, 2009

Where to for revenue recognition?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 8:01 am

Categories: pricing, saas

Tags: Revenue, Taleo Corp., Phil, Revenue Recognition, Operational Accounting, Financial Services, Finance, Dennis Howlett

Fellow Irregulars Phil Wainewright and Jason Corsello are batting around the implementation services revenue recognition issue following Taleo’s restatement of earnings. Phil uses it as a reason to take a sideways swipe at the on-premise vendors:

I wonder what the impact on SAP, Oracle and Accenture’s financials would be if they couldn’t recognize all their implementation and license fees until the application had been up-and-running for a three-year stretch? Ouch!

while Jason believes this might allow Taleo to benefit:

I would expect new implementation partners to come calling to Taleo.  This could be great news that allows them to build deeper channel relationships with multiple tiers of services partners.  Not that Taleo is doing a horrible job today (in fact they probably do implementation better than most) but services could potentially become a differentiating factors if they could balance the demand on rapid implementation with long-term client success complimented by more specialized services.

At one time, the software industry had a certain notoriety from playing revenue recognition shell games. One only has to think back to the days when CA regularly announced rule changes much in the style of Rollerball. We now know where that ended with former CEO Sanjay Kumar drawing a 12 year stretch at Club Fed in 2006. Much earlier, the then PeopleSoft got itself into an SEC tangle over R&D expense shifting of some $500 million through a special purpose vehicle. If the Taleo story is another example of the industry cleaning up its act then all to the good. I have reservations.

While Phil is right to point out that this apparent rule change further complicates the saas revenue model, the decision to rateably recognize implementation revenue over the life of the initial contract is wrong headed. In my view, Taleo should have stuck to their guns. It is illogical because it fails the fundamental cost and revenue matching principle inherent in generally accepted accounting principles.

Using Phil’s logic for instance, you could argue that services provided by on premise vendors are to be recognized over infinity because application licenses are usually couched in terms of a perpetual right to use. No-one is going to agree to that any more than they’d agree to the cost of filling your car with gas as something to be amortized over the time it takes between refills. That’s how silly the logic can go.

The wider point about disparate treatment is worthy of discussion. When vendors treat revenue in different ways then it makes like for like comparisons difficult. This matters to the financial analyst community but should also matter to buyers who should be evaluating on vendor viability. Complexity breeds suspicion and I can imagine that customers might be baffled by these artificial machinations. More to the point, if revenue is to be recognized rateably across the board then I would expect deal makers to extend the logic to include terms of settlement. In doing so, it would expose the logical fallacy to which Taleo has been forced to submit.

Can you imagine a vendor willing to accept settlement for implementation services on the same terms as its online service contract period? It’s not going to happen because the disruption to cash flow would be too great. And what happens when a company decides to switch via a get out clause? Using the same logic, the vendor would be entitled to view the contract as terminated and accelerate deferred revenue.

Even so, both Phil and Jason’s arguments intensify the light on saas differentiation. Saas vendors only get paid for what they deliver. In those terms, failure is less likely. That’s all to the good.

PS - unlike Phil, I used to be a practising accountant. What do I know?

March 6th, 2009

Weekend rant: cloud computing myths

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:09 am

Categories: saas

Tags: Cloud Computing, Dennis Howlett

I have a great deal of respect for Jon Collins, managing director of FreeForm Dynamics, a British boutique analyst firm. He applies the kind of factual rigor that is so often missing from marketing pitches.

In the above presentation, Collins uses survey data to explode some of the myths about cloud computing - not least of which are claims like: “Cloud services are crossing the chasm and entering a period of widespread adoption.”

If you’re thinking about ‘the cloud’ - whatever that means - then this might be a wake up call to re-think what we’re really looking at here. Or to put it in another context - PaaS - as Bob Warfield said in a recent Irregulars conversation:

That has been the problem with these labels.  The good examples beget the buzz stealers and pretty soon everything is an object-oriented Web 2.0 Cloud as a Service Thingey.

March 5th, 2009

RightNow: right for now

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 11:32 am

Categories: CRM, saas

Tags: Customer, RightNow Technologies, Somwe, Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Dennis Howlett

I’ve just had an extensive briefing from RightNow, the on-demand customer service solution provider. The company’s business model, offering and pace provide a solid case study in what it means to be an on demand provider in a downturn economy.

RightNow turned profitable in Q4 of 2008 for the first time and I was interested in understanding what this means and how they’ve achieved this position after 11 years in the market. One of the beauties of the on-demand model is that it is relatively straightforward to adjust cost levers. By scaling back some activities, the company could turn losses into pennies of profit without damaging the revenue stream. That’s important in a market where, for example, SAP has very publicly said it needs to find some $200 to 300 million in savings. The on-premise ‘big box’ vendors don’t have the same agility. They have large GSA organizations that take some restructuring. You can of course argue that RightNow has the benefit of a relatively small organization that is readily molded to the new economic realities. By the same token it means RightNow is able to demonstrate to the financial analyst community that it represents an attractive investment opportunity.

The company likes to get year long agreements with its customers but will go down to monthly renewals. During our conversation, the company said that while it offers pilot trials, it is seeing an increase in the number of customers that want to enter into multi-year contracts. RightNow encourages that by offering long term deals based on current pricing with no ratchet. That gives customers certainty and transfers the inflationary risk back to RightNow. As Vinnie Mirchandani notes, this is not exactly welcome by the analyst community but reflects a relationship value proposition that can be readily factored into the decision making process.

On the product front, the company is in a continuous but controlled release cycle where it delivers new functionality every quarter. That’s almost a given these days for the on-demand vendors and again, contrasts sharply with on-premise vendors who typically are in one and two year release cycles.

However, all this innovation goodness has to be consumed. RightNow offers a 24 month grace period during which customers can decide which upgrades they want and when. This is a huge differentiator because it means customers can avoid forced release cycles when they may not be ready. Customers can also skip releases. Looked at through the development lens, it means that while RightNow pushes forward, it always ensures backwards compatibility.

The last six months has seen a change of emphasis in the release cycle. Rather than introducing blockbuster new functionality customers are saying they want incremental step change that improves existing functionality. The idea is that customers should be able to hone existing solutions that are directly relevant to their needs in the current recession. RightNow has some 47 projects running in its labs. Somwe are aimed at new while others are about enhancements. This makes and emphasis switch relatively easy.

One example I saw was the ‘product registration’ module. Here, the company is responding to the trend for retail customers to buy from warehouse style operations but to have service handled directly by the originating vendor. That requires a registration procedure from which the vending company can target service more effectively while providing the opportunity to undertake new marketing. Another example is widget syndication where the customer is able to deliver context sensitive content, tweaking that according to configurable business rules.

RightNow uses the Microsoft .NET framework as its founding technology. That’s interesting at a time when the general impression one gets is that on-demand vendors are eschewing Microsoft for open source or other alternatives. The choice of Microsoft opens the door to a massive community of developers who are used to Microsoft while at the same time demonstrating the massive scale the company has achieved.

RightNow scaling

Technology vendors like to believe they are making a difference. The current economic climate is showing that older models may no longer be the right choice, especially when you have to rapidly change course. Taking a ‘deep dive’ discussion with RightNow has been valuable on multiple levels. Business model, go to market and technology are combining to give the company the ability to please both financial masters and customers. More important, the company is signposting the way forward for new classes of application where there really is a different kind of engagement between customers and the vendor community.