RightNow Technologies is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ:RNOW) that has built a successful business on open source. Although you won't read about them in the usual open source blogs or hear about them at open source conferences, they are as important a user of open source technology as companies like Yahoo, Google, Sabre and many others. RightNow offers a hosted or "on demand" CRM service used by over 1,000 organizations including the likes of British Airways, Cisco, John Deere, Nikon and many others.
RightNow is not a huge company nor are they as well known as their chief rival salesforce.com but they are profitable and have a run rate north of $100 million annually. One of their chief advantages could be that they have built their service offering on an open source stack, using Linux, Apache and MySQL. While salesforce.com uses a lot of open source technology, they also continue to write a big check to Oracle every year for their database technology. (And now that Oracle is a competitor in the CRM space, I would imagine it's not a check that Marc Benniof likes to write.)
Whether you're interested in on-demand CRM or not, RightNow's use of open source technology is important as a validation of open source scale-out. RightNow is handing business-critical applications for Fortune 1,000 companies as well as small and medium businesses and government agencies with millions of queries and tens of thousands of users. This helps break one of the "chicken and egg" challenges to adoption, namely when companies ask "who is using open source on a large scale?" While the open source community will often hold out companies like Google, Yahoo as case studies, most IT organizations have as much in common with these type sof web applications as the average DBA has in common with Brad Pitt. But in the case of RightNow, the applications are transactional, high volume and they provide functionality that IT organizations can relate to. And increasingly, companies will already be using open source based applications, whether it's RightNow or others.
Back in the mid-1990s there was a wave of adoption of enterprise applications built on client/server technology. While some client/server applications were more successful than others, in general, the category became widely successful and it became a self-reinforcing success. One could argue that the fact that SAP could scale in ERP applications helped Siebel gain credibility and acceptance in CRM and PeopleSoft in HR and so on. I expect that five years from now the largest and most successful enterprise application companies will all be built on an open source stack. Customers will come to expect the scalability and cost-effectiveness that comes from open source and those who do not build on an open source stack will be at a competitive disadavantage.
- LinuxWorld: The coming software revolution
- eWeek: RightNow touts open source and on demand
- InfoWorld: What constitutes an open source company?
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