Bozeman, Montana-based RightNow Technologies has unveiled new "defense-ready hosting capabilities" designed to support both the Department of Defense and other civilian government and intelligence agencies, according to company officials, who added that "two commands within the DoD have made the decision to move ahead" with this new offering.

“Our new secure hosting capabilities will help our DoD clients to tap into the cloud... The DoD requires a more intense level of security than most civilian agencies,” says Greg Gianforte (News - Alert), CEO and founder, RightNow

RightNow has been working government contracts for over ten years, and today counts clients in over 155 public sector clients, including nearly every US cabinet-level agency as well as the Army, Marines, Air Force, members of the Intelligence Community and DoD.

RightNow officials say they expect their DoD contracts to furnish the same benefits of SaaS (News - Alert), "such as lower cost of ownership, fast deployments and exceptional scalability" as civilian users find: "Because the DoD requires an unparalleled level of security, RightNow’s new hosting capabilities use DITSCAP/DIACAP to ensure compliance with DoD Instruction 8500.2, meet US Federal security standard FISMA (NIST 800-53) and include a 24x7 dedicated security and information assurance team," company officials say, adding that civilian contracts with extraordinary security needs can have "a second secure hosting environment" to meet their needs.

“In the last year, our North America public sector sales grew 66 percent, showing the demand for cloud based CRM is growing among government agencies,” says Kevin Paschuck, vice president, public sector, RightNow.

About a month ago TMC 's Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) blogged that he "reached out to Greg Gianforte, the CEO of RightNow Technologies (News - Alert), regarding how his company is doing. Why? Well the hosted communications/call center/CRM market seems to be doing better than others as a result of reduced CAPEX budgets and I know some others in the space are growing quickly."

 

Tehrani found that RightNow had record sales in Q4 -- "For the year, our revenue was up 25 percent Y/Y and we generated nearly $15 million in cash from operations while returning to GAAP profitability. We gave guidance for 2009 to grow recurring revenue an additional 10 percent to 15 percent in 2009 while expanding profit margins," Gianforte told him.