Oracle acquires RightNow for £936m

Oracle has agreed to buy cloud-based customer service specialist RightNow for about $1.5bn (£936m) or $43 (£27) a share.

The transaction was unanimously approved by the RightNow board yesterday, and is expected to be finalised by early 2012.

Oracle has said that the acquisition of RightNow will see it provide enhanced customer services delivery across call centres, the web and social networks.

"RightNow's leading customer service cloud is a very important addition to Oracle's public cloud," said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of Oracle Development in a statement.

"Oracle is moving aggressively towards offering a full range of cloud solutions including salesforce automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle public cloud," he continued.

The move is the latest in a series of acquisitions that will help Oracle turn up the heat on rivals in the cloud space, and especially on Salesforce.com.

"This move is a reaction to Salesforce. It does strengthen Oracle's capability and now there is little that Salesforce can do that Oracle cannot," said Ovum analyst Tim Wellings.

However, he added that Oracle's shopping spree presents serious challenges for the company.

"Although Oracle has acquired the best companies available, the challenge for the company now is to integrate these technologies with its current services – this can typically take two years," he said.

Wellings added that customers may not be prepared to wait for Oracle to iron out all the integration issues it faces.

"If customers want customer management, then they will ask how it will integrate with the Oracle technology already in place," he said.