RightNow's Gianforte: 'Only we can meet public sector Cloud Computing needs'

With public sector Cloud Computing now on the political agenda around the world, RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte argues that his firm is the only major Cloud provider that can meet the needs of the sector.

'The reality is Salesforce.com, Oracle On Demand CRM and the cornucopia of other Cloud-based offerings don't even meet the moderate security levels for federal agency applications, let alone the higher security levels required by the Department of Defense that we are deploying solutions under today,' he claims.

'Our Cloud offering differentiates us from our competitors and puts us a league of our own. For example, the United States Army Human Resources Command last quarter committed to our government Cloud offering. This command manages all personnel activity for the U.S. Army, enlisted, officers, Reserves, National Guard and certain Joint Forces. They selected our CX platform for the entire command beating out Oracle and other legacy CRM custom developed, on-premise solutions.

'We have had great success in the public sector but having our government Cloud significantly benefits the government accounts that already use RightNow and allows us to move forward with other areas that require this specialised secure capability,' he adds. 'Our government initiatives align well also with President Obama's new Open Government directive which requires compliance for all federal agencies for increased transparency, participation and collaboration. If you Google 'Open Government Directive' it is a very short document. It is only a couple of pages but it is a mandate put out by the Obama Administration that all Federal agencies must comply with and in fact they have some deliverables as quickly as 60 days.

'Because of our track record of success serving federal government customers we are well positioned to be a strategic partner as cabinet level agencies strive to meet this new directive. In fact, within one week the Department of Defense publicly declared their compliance with the Open Government directive because of their existing use of RightNow on the website Defense.gov."

This experience, he argues, positions RightNow well for future public sector business. 'We think because our current solution set the mandate and our existing relationships with every executive cabinet level agency we are in a very unique position to help these agencies satisfy those requirements,' he says.