RightNow Technologies is a publicly traded company that has built a successful business on open source.They are as important a user of open source technology as companies like Yahoo, Google, Sabre and many others. RightNow offers a hosted or "on demand" CRM service used by over 1,000 organizations including the likes of British airways, Cisco, John Deere, Nikon and many others.

One of the chief advantages of Right Now could be that they have built their service offering on an open source stack, using Linux, Apache and MySQL.

Whether you're interested in on-demand CRM or not, RightNow's use of open source technology is important as a validation of open source scale-out. RightNow is handing business-critical applications for Fortune 1,000 companies as well as small and medium businesses and government agencies with millions of queries and tens of thousands of users. This helps break one of the "chicken and egg" challenges to adoption, namely when companies ask "who is using open source on a large scale?" in the case of RightNow, the applications are transactional, high volume and they provide functionality that IT organizations can relate to.

Source: 1Prashanth RaiTag(s):Open+source, CRM.