Feature
RightNow does social-focused CRM for enterprises and has expanded its presence with the capture of HiveLive and its customer engagement-focused products. The combined product will be available in November, but new customers can still start using HiveLive while existing customers remain unaffected.
The purchase for US$ 6 million does not quite match the US$ 7.6 million invested by venture capital partners. Even so, HiveLive was doing something right -- it managed to rack up some kudos in the near-two years of live product, notching up Gartner Cool Vendor status last year and picking up both Adobe and EDR as customers over the summer.
HiveLive's key component was the Hive, a community building tool for blogs, wikis and other content. Using the Hive, companies could create their own social sites on-demand to attract users, encourage stickiness and improve revenue.
The acquisition allows RightNow to broaden its offering and meet the increasing demands of clients wanting fast and easy social features for their own sites, projects or products.
The RightNow side of the equation, Cloud Monitor (and its service, marketing and sales solutions), will help convert the input from HiveLive into CRM-actionable data and a better experience for customers of its 1,900 plus client companies.
