Oracle's US$1.5 billion purchase of cloud software vendor RightNow Technologies took another step forward on Thursday as a vast majority of RightNow shareholders approved the deal.

Oracle is buying RightNow Technologies for about US$1.5 billion in order to boost its recently announced Public Cloud with customer-service software, the companies announced Monday. The deal is expected to close late this year or in early 2012.

Repeated and time-consuming contacts are two of the top complaints consumers have with telecommunication service providers, according to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO).

Telecommunication providers and ISPs are now working harder than before to win back old customers and keep existing ones, according to a recent customer service satisfaction report.

CRM vendor RightNow has agreed to buy Q-go.com, a vendor of natural language-based search software, for $US34 million in cash, the companies announced Tuesday.

CRM vendor RightNow announced a new SaaS (software as a service) pricing and licensing model on Thursday that it says provides customers with fairer, clearer deals. The company also issued a "Cloud Challenge" to competitors, urging them to adopt similar principles.

When Nikon decided to merge and consolidate customer data from more than 25 disparate sources into one system, officials didn't want the burden of maintaining it in-house, yet whatever they went with had to meet all their requirements and work picture-perfect.