Corporate culture clash looms with Oracle's acquisition of RightNow

The acquisition of RightNow by Oracle makes sense for both companies CRM solutions strategies. Oracle wants to beef up its overall “cloud” portfolio.  This is a strength of RightNow- one of the pioneers of the SaaS deployment model. It also needs a stronger play in the customer service sector- an area that salesforce.com targeted several years ago. This is the core domain strength of RightNow.

RightNow has had good success, posting strong growth over the last several years –  but a  $250 million dollar software company  finds itself at an awkward size to compete against the giants like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.

The big risk to this deal is that the corporate cultures of Oracle and RightNow could not be more different. Oracle’s bare knuckle-approach to sales and how it treats customers is 180 degrees the opposite to RightNow’s ethos of client-centricity, and flexibility.

Many clients that have chosen RightNow may not be happy to hear that Oracle is their new software supplier for customer service. And, the employees at RightNow are likely to find working for Oracle a unpleasant contrast to the Montana-based RightNow’s corporate ethos.