RightNow Opens Oracle’s SaaS Play; Puts Salesforce.com on Alert
Two days ago, Oracle acquired RightNow for $1.5B, and many analysts immediately said the purchase was, for all intents and purposes, missiles aimed at Salesforce.com.
But how? What does this mean? How to decipher this? What does the acquisition do for Oracle? Won’t Oracle’s ‘Public Cloud’ be comprised of technologies already in Oracle’s stack?
Not exactly. According to ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright (and Larry Dignan), Oracle’s purchase of SaaS pioneer RightNow basically signals Oracle’s intent to go cloud shopping and pick up a slew of tier 2 SaaS players.
With the acquisition of early SaaS pioneer RightNow Technologies, Oracle has signalled its intention to build out its Public Cloud offering with what will likely become a string of acquisitions of second-tier SaaS vendors. I’m in total agreement with my ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan that the official press statement was “basically shorthand for ‘Oracle is going cloud shopping’.”
So who might be on the list?
I’d expect the shopping list to include public companies including Taleo and several others in the talent management sphere, along with ServiceNow.com in the IT service management space and various less well known names from other sectors.
Things are going to get interesting in the next few months. The most interesting part of all of is is the ideological shift that’s taking place: Oracle might not be building out its Public Cloud with primarily in-house technology; it plans on creating it via acquisition. And we all know Oracle’s extremely good at identifying smart acquisition targets.
Popcorn, anyone?
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