By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Weird Al Yankovic’s “She Never Told Me She Was A Mime.” That’s the great thing about having
kids, you get socially acceptable excuses to play with Hot Wheels, read Where The Wild Things Are and Harold And the Purple Crayon again and
listen to Weird Al, the musical and spiritual heir to Spike Jones:
First CoffeeSM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego
virtually sat down with RightNow Technologies’ founder and CEO Greg
Gianforte for a Q&A as he explained why he’s not afraid of Microsoft and SAP, why there’s a lot more to
business than money, The Big Idea, impressing
candidates you’re recruiting by letting them camp in the snow and the
competitive advantage of the tater pig.
Excerpts here today, the full interview on Thursday on the
TMC site:
Hi Greg, thanks for
taking time out with us today. You’ve already tried retiring once, if you leave
RightNow would it be to retire or start something else?
I’m not sure the whole concept of “retirement” as we
generally understand it is really valid. We all have skills and resources, and
it’s really our responsibility to use those skills and resources in a
worthwhile manner. Putting them on the shelf doesn’t seem very appealing or
even ethical to me.
There are those who
say the on-demand space is a three-way horserace between you, salesforce.com
and NetSuite. If one of you comes to dominate, what will that company have done
the others didn’t?
The big issue isn’t who is going to dominate the on-demand
space. It’s the fact that the on-demand space is going to dominate the enterprise
software market as a whole. So instead of looking at on-demand as a single
market that the three of us are battling to dominate, it’s probably better to
see on-demand as a business model that’s completely replacing an old-fashioned,
low-ROI model that is becoming another artifact in the history of information
technology.
SAP and Microsoft are
getting ready to jump into hosted CRM. Nervous about being bought out or driven
out of business?
Their problem is that they can’t possibly beat us at our own
game. SAP, for example, would have to completely re-write all of its
applications from scratch in order to build a multi-tenancy architecture to
match ours. And, from a business perspective, they would have to replace this
huge services ecosystem they’ve developed over the years that thrives on
complexity and difficulty.
Microsoft faces similar hurdles. Enterprise applications are
something you have to sell direct, which they don’t do. And Microsoft’s
customers are in IT – not the business unit, which is where the on-demand buyer
is.
Also, these big software companies like to take the money
and run. They have no idea what it’s like to depend on a subscription model
where you must satisfy your customer to get a renewal. We do. That’s why our
renewal rate is 90 percent.
So the dinosaurs of the software industry can make all the
noise they want to. To really come after us, they’d have to completely cannibalize
their existing business. They can’t afford to do that, and Wall Street won’t
let them.
What’s the best music
to listen to at work?
I work at work, so I’m listening to my team and my customers
– not music. However, when I’m not working, I listen to country-and-western
music.
RightNow has quite an
innovative employee charitable contributions program. Why is that an important
part of the RightNow corporate culture?
It’s a sad day when people are just working for a paycheck. I
could talk about Maslow’s hierarchy here, but suffice to say that higher
purpose and a sense of mission are essential for human happiness. Plus, I
believe both individuals and organizations have a responsibility to the community
in which they exist. That means giving time and talent, not just money. So, in
addition to matching our employees’ charitable contributions, we also encourage
hands-on participation by paying them for up to 40 hours of volunteer work per
year. With 500 employees, that means we’re pouring thousands of hours of effort
into very worthwhile endeavors everywhere our business operates.
You’ve bootstrapped a
leading high-tech firm in Montana from your spare bedroom to a campus full of
buildings, which just proves it can be done anywhere, I guess. Are there
times your location’s a disadvantage, like recruiting executive talent from the
coasts?
Bozeman is actually a great location for building an
organization. People here have a great work ethic, we have a high retention
rate, and our office costs are obviously a fraction of what they’d be in
Silicon Valley. We’ve overcome any recruiting issues we might have had by
starting our interviews with two questions: What’s your favorite winter sport,
and what small town did your spouse grow up in? We even had one candidate who
declined our offer of a hotel room, because he said he’d rather camp out for a few
nights. It turned out we had a pretty bad snowstorm that week, but he camped
out anyway. Needless to say, he took the job.
My editor was
intrigued by your saying 80 percent of the improvements in your products come
from users, and 20 percent from “the Big Idea.” Can you elaborate on the Big
Idea? Do you mean what y’all at RightNow think, or the accepted wisdom in the
industry about what’s coming?
Every so often in the development of your business, you get
to the top of a hill. What you have to do then is find a bigger hill to climb
that’s adjacent to the one you’re on top of at the time. That’s the next Big
Idea for your company. For us, the first hill was web self-service. Once we
became the leaders there, we turned our eyes to delivering a full eservice
suite. Then we entered the contact center market. And now we’re establishing
our leadership in end-to-end CRM.
Why hasn’t the tater
pig caught on nationally yet? I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
We’re not sure we want the tater pig to catch on nationally,
actually, because it’s an important recruiting incentive for us. In fact, we
have attorneys and lobbyists currently working around the clock to establish
ironclad legal protections that would prevent any culinary establishment
anywhere else in the United States or overseas from cooking any form of sausage
whatsoever inside of any potato or other edible tuber.
...
First CoffeeSM is pleased to see there’s been a small outbreak of common sense over at
the Federal
Communications Commission, as they’ve decided to give VoIP service
providers more time – but not much more – to “comply with an order requiring
that all subscribers acknowledge potential limitations of the E911 services,”
according to industry observer Jay
Wrolstad.
Basically they have a few more weeks, as enforcement’s been
pushed back to September 28th instead of this week.
It’s not free grace, though. To “qualify” for the extension,
Wrolstad reports, “service providers must have filed a report on or before Aug.
10 regarding progress in obtaining confirmation from their customers.”
Back on June 3 the FCC decreed that VoIP carriers provide
E911 capabilities to their subscribers within 120 days, notify customers when
E911 service isn’t available through VoIP or otherwise not like traditional
911.
Cutting off service “is an unreasonable demand, especially
since we are still in phase one of E911 with wireless systems,” IDC analyst
Will Stofega tells Wrolstad.
It’s also one that falls disproportionately on smaller
providers, which amounts to an artificial weeding-out process much better left
to the market itself. It’s not possible to find a single example of a
government controlling the emergence of a new technology like VoIP where
government control improved the technology in any way – one reason the Internet
turned out so well was that after providing the basic pieces the government got
the heck out of the way and let creative people do their thing.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
