April 2008 marked the beginning of the relationship.
October 2008 marked its acceleration.
Within just six months, Virtuos progressed from a reseller relationship with RightNow Technologies (Nasdaq: RNOW) to becoming a Certified Premium Partner—an important elevation in the young company's rapidly developing Cloud CRM practice.
The expanded relationship covered the resale of RightNow Cloud CRM software, services and support, together with the implementation of CRM solutions for organizations across the Asia-Pacific region.
For Virtuos, still in its first year, this was an important vote of confidence.
The partnership was moving from selling technology to mastering it.
April → October 2008
6 months
Reseller → Certified Premium Partner
Six Months. One Significant Step Forward.
The progression was remarkably quick.
April 2008
RightNow + Virtuos
Virtuos begins its relationship with one of the emerging leaders in Cloud-based CRM and Customer Service.
April–October 2008
Build the Practice
Virtuos begins developing sales, consulting and technical capabilities around the RightNow platform.
October 2008
RightNow APAC Comes to India
Senior RightNow specialists spend several days working directly with Virtuos teams.
27 October 2008
Certified Premium Partner
Virtuos advances its partnership status and prepares to pursue more sophisticated implementations across APAC.
RightNow Comes to Virtuos
This milestone wasn't achieved simply through paperwork or a commercial agreement.
It required investment in people.
RightNow specialists Abbas Ali, Head of Technical Services for RightNow APAC, and Yong Sheng Li (Jun) visited India to work directly with Virtuos.
Over approximately four to five days, the RightNow and Virtuos teams immersed themselves in the platform—exploring modules, studying new releases and conducting parallel technical and sales training.
For a young technology practice, this kind of direct engagement was invaluable.
It wasn't simply product training.
It was knowledge transfer.
Learn. Experiment. Master.
One of the strongest observations came from Abbas Ali, who found the Virtuos technical team had already begun learning the platform before formal training started.
“I am ecstatic to see that Virtuos teams had picked up the essentials to get started even before our training program began.”
The team, he observed, was ready to experiment further with the RightNow platform.
That detail captures something important about the formative Virtuos culture.
- Don't wait to be taught.
- Start learning.
- Then use formal training to go deeper.
Building More Than Technical Capability
Certification required more than understanding software.
Virtuos and RightNow jointly worked on the commercial foundations needed to develop the market.
Together, the teams explored:
- Target Customer Pursuits
- Go-to-Market Strategy
- Sales Enablement
- Marketing & Promotions
- Solution Demonstrations
- Implementation Capability
- Delivery Readiness
Virtuos was also given access to RightNow NFR licenses with unlimited users, enabling its teams to use the suite internally, experiment with functionality and demonstrate solutions to prospective customers.
This was important.
You cannot build a serious technology practice around presentation slides.
The teams needed the platform in their hands.
Retail. E-Commerce. Travel.
Virtuos had already begun identifying where RightNow's Cloud Customer Service proposition could have particular relevance in India.
Three verticals stood out:
Retail
Growing customer volumes and increasingly complex service interactions created a need for more sophisticated customer-service environments.
E-Commerce
Digital businesses required customer service that could operate at Internet speed and scale.
Travel
High interaction volumes, reservations, changes, disruptions and service requests made travel a natural environment for Cloud-based Customer Service.
Virtuos was developing a strong opportunity pipeline around these industries.
And one of these sectors would soon become especially important to the RightNow–Virtuos story.
Travel.
A Joint Go-to-Market Vision
The partnership was also being shaped by a shared view of the Indian opportunity.
Yong Sheng Li (Jun) highlighted Virtuos' market focus and customer targeting as important ingredients in building the RightNow business.
“I see a great moment and clear go-to-market strategy from Venky, and his sharp insight on what clients to target can make a big difference.”
He also expressed confidence that RightNow could introduce its existing global customers operating in India to Virtuos as the company continued expanding its implementation and delivery teams.
That opened an important new dimension to the partnership.
Virtuos wouldn't necessarily have to create every customer relationship from scratch.
- RightNow already had global customers.
- Some had Indian operations.
- A capable local partner could serve them.
From India to APAC
The agreement wasn't conceived as India-only.
Virtuos' expanded relationship with RightNow included implementation opportunities for companies across Asia-Pacific.
That was ambitious for a company not yet one year old.
But the direction was increasingly clear:
- Build expertise in India.
- Establish reference customers.
- Develop repeatable delivery capability.
- Then take that capability across borders.
The company had already completed its first remotely delivered overseas project earlier in 2008.
The RightNow Premium Partnership created another route toward becoming a regional enterprise technology organization.
Customer Service Was Becoming Customer Experience
RightNow's platform was particularly important because it approached customer relationships from the perspective of service and interaction.
Its capabilities included areas such as:
- Customer Self-Service
- Knowledge Management
- Email Management
- Live Interaction
- Issue Tracking
- Customer Satisfaction Measurement
These capabilities reflected an important evolution in CRM.
Customer relationship management could no longer be understood purely as managing sales opportunities and customer records.
The customer experienced an organization through every interaction.
- Every question.
- Every service request.
- Every email.
- Every support conversation.
- Every answer found—or not found.
The emerging challenge was therefore bigger than CRM:
It was Customer Experience.
“Born in the Cloud” Becomes Capability
Earlier in 2008, Virtuos had described itself as a company born in the Cloud.
The RightNow relationship gave that statement increasing substance.
RightNow was built around delivering enterprise CRM capabilities through a Cloud model at a time when many organizations still relied heavily on conventional on-premise enterprise applications.
For Virtuos, the partnership created the opportunity to build expertise not simply around another CRM application, but around an emerging way of delivering enterprise software.
- Software without traditional deployment constraints.
- Continuous platform evolution.
- Browser-based access.
- Faster adoption.
- Customer Service delivered from the Cloud.
What had begun as a technology conviction was becoming an operational capability.
The First Nine Months
Put the milestone into context.
Virtuos had been incorporated on 18 January 2008.
By 27 October 2008, the company was still only around nine months old.
Yet during that short period it had:
- Won enterprise CRM customers
- Built partnerships with KANA, Maximizer and RightNow
- Delivered major CRM implementations
- Opened Mumbai operations
- Completed its first overseas remotely delivered project
- Developed specialist industry propositions
- Built Cloud CRM capabilities
- Advanced to RightNow Certified Premium Partner status
And contemporary company information still placed the Virtuos team at only around 10–20 employees.
Small team. Rapid capability building.
Moments from the RightNow Enablement
From the Archives
October 2008 — From Partnership to Proficiency
The significance of this announcement isn't simply the words “Premium Partner.”
It is what Virtuos had to build behind them.
A technology partnership becomes valuable only when people can:
- Understand the platform.
- Demonstrate it.
- Design with it.
- Implement it.
- Support it.
- And create customer outcomes from it.
The October 2008 RightNow enablement was another step toward building that depth.
Partnership opened the door.
Expertise gave us permission to walk through it.
An Important Chapter Was Just Beginning
In retrospect, this milestone carries additional historical significance.
RightNow would become an important part of the early Virtuos Customer Experience journey.
The relationship would lead to customer opportunities, regional engagement and greater participation within RightNow's Asia-Pacific ecosystem.
Virtuos would subsequently receive recognition from RightNow at its APAC Summit in Australia.
And several years later, RightNow Technologies would become part of Oracle—connecting this formative relationship with another important chapter in the Virtuos enterprise technology journey.
What looked in October 2008 like an upgrade in partner status was therefore the beginning of something considerably larger.
