VirtuosPartnerswithRightNowTechnologies—ADefiningBetonCloudCRM

Some partnerships add another product to a portfolio.

Others can influence the direction of a company.

On 18 April 2008, less than three months after its incorporation, Virtuos signed a partnership agreement with RightNow Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: RNOW), then a prominent global provider of Cloud-based CRM and customer-service technologies with more than 1,800 customers worldwide.

For the young Virtuos, this represented a significant milestone.

The company had entered 2008 with a conviction that enterprise applications—and particularly CRM—would increasingly move toward the Cloud.

RightNow gave Virtuos an opportunity to turn that conviction into a much broader business.

Cloud computing in 2008 was still an emerging enterprise proposition.

Most organizations continued to operate business applications within conventional on-premise environments. Concerns around security, integration, availability and control meant Cloud adoption was far from inevitable.

Virtuos took a different view.

From its earliest days, the company described itself as:

Virtuos believed Cloud technologies could fundamentally change the economics and speed of enterprise CRM.

Cloud could provide:

• Scalability
• Faster Innovation
• Adaptability
• Resilient Availability
• Real-time Collaboration
• Anywhere Access

And, importantly, it could allow organizations to adopt sophisticated customer-facing technologies without necessarily building and maintaining every component of the underlying infrastructure themselves.

The RightNow partnership aligned closely with that philosophy.

The speed at which Virtuos assembled its initial technology ecosystem was notable.

Within fewer than 90 days of incorporation, the company had established relationships with:

Together, these alliances gave the emerging Virtuos business access to different technologies, deployment models and customer-service capabilities.

For Virtuos, RightNow was especially important because of the alignment around Cloud.

The partnership also expanded the scope of what Virtuos could offer customers.

RightNow's suite brought together capabilities spanning:

• Customer Service
• Marketing
• Sales
• Customer Feedback
• Knowledge Management
• Live Chat
• Web Self-Service
• Quote-to-Order

Rather than treating each interaction as an isolated process, these capabilities could help organizations connect multiple parts of the customer relationship.

Virtuos saw the opportunity in broader terms:

This was important.

The enterprise technology market was still predominantly speaking the language of CRM.

Yet the emerging Virtuos proposition was already beginning to move toward something larger—the experience a customer receives across channels, interactions and moments.

That thinking would ultimately become increasingly central to the company's evolution.

Virtuos and RightNow initially identified three sectors where Cloud-based customer-service technology could create particularly strong value:

These weren't arbitrary choices.

Each industry had a high frequency of customer interaction and a growing need to connect service across multiple channels.

RightNow's Cloud platform, combined with Virtuos' consulting and implementation capabilities, created an opportunity to address those needs.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the story began well before Virtuos itself was incorporated.

Venky Vijay Reddi and Yong Sheng Lee (Jun) had been discussing the possibility of introducing RightNow CRM into India for more than two years.

At the time, however, RightNow's US headquarters had not viewed entering the Indian market positively.

The opportunity remained dormant.

Then Virtuos was created.

Within its first three months, the company began demonstrating rapid progress—building global partnerships, winning enterprise customers and establishing itself within India's CRM market.

That momentum changed the conversation.

RightNow approached Virtuos to resume discussions and initiate a practice in India.

• Two years of conversations.
• Three months of Virtuos momentum.
• One partnership finally brought to life.

That backstory makes this considerably more than an ordinary channel announcement.

Virtuos saw the RightNow relationship as an opportunity that extended beyond India.

The company believed the partnership could eventually help it scale operations across Asia-Pacific, delivering Cloud-based Customer Experience and Customer Service solutions to organizations across the region.

The ambition was therefore already international.

Virtuos would combine:

to create a specialist customer-experience proposition.

In retrospect, the RightNow partnership occupies a particularly important place in Virtuos history.

What began in April 2008 as an alliance around Cloud CRM would subsequently develop into a much deeper relationship.

Virtuos would build expertise around the platform, win customers and participate in RightNow's Asia-Pacific partner ecosystem.

And when Oracle later acquired RightNow Technologies, the technology itself would become part of a much larger enterprise Cloud and Customer Experience portfolio.

For Virtuos, the partnership therefore became one of the bridges connecting its earliest CRM years with the broader Customer Experience and enterprise Cloud journey that followed.

The pace of Virtuos' beginnings becomes especially visible when viewed as a timeline.

There is another reason this announcement matters historically.

The original Virtuos proposition was built around three fundamental customer functions:

• Sales.
• Service.
• Marketing.

RightNow helped connect those functions with additional capabilities such as knowledge, feedback, chat and web self-service.

The result was beginning to resemble something more expansive than conventional CRM.

It was about orchestrating the customer's interactions with the enterprise.

In 2008, we called it CRM.
Increasingly, we began calling it Customer Experience.