RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte warned vendors and users at the Business Cloud Summit not to accentuate their corporate flaws by moving to web-based applications.
“For us, the Cloud means our system goes faster, costs less to own, and our customers have more agility. The Cloud is just a delivery method for those benefits,” he said.
However, one the problems associated with CRM is that it often focuses exclusively on the internal processes of the orgnisation. “If all you do is make your employees more efficient, by using CRM all you are going to do is upset your customers more quickly.”
Noting that over the past year the wider business market has come to recognise that the Cloud is the next generation delivery model for enterprise applications, Gianforte told BusinessCloud9.com editor Stuart Lauchlan that software developers’ business models have not kept pace.
“Although there has been a lot of innovation about delivery of software in the Cloud, there hasn’t been much on the software contracting,” he said. “We were as guilty as some of the other vendors. We had dragged along a lot of the software practices from enterprise applications. Customers wanted price certainty, they didn’t want to be locked in, and they didn’t want shelfware.”
Taking the opportunity for a swipe at some of his larger rivals, Gianforte likened Salesforce.com’s licencing model to what one analyst called “shelfware as a service” because almost a third of its revenue came from unused modules.
He also described a billboard that RightNow erected outside Oracle’s Silicon Valley headquarters that depicted a ball and chain labelled “Oracle”.
These messages were designed to highlight RightNow’s Cloud Services Agreement, he acknowledged. This was a new business service model that gave the customer the right to terminate their contract annually and a right to rebalance their terms. “We think it is a better way to do business,” Gianforte said. It has had a tremendous response from customers, he added, “But we haven't heard a lot from the other vendors.”
The RightNow CEO backed the view of London School of Economics professor Leslie Willcocks who urged the summit to move its focus from Cloud computing to Cloud business services. “Our focus is on business value, and that is a message the business understands.”
