Despite those difficulties, British Air met its deadlines and launched the product on schedule. Bevan attributes that success to the chemistry between RightNow’s and BA’s staffs. "The two teams got on remarkably well. There was quite a positive attitude on both sides of the house, and that did see us through," he says. In sum, he says integrating a hosted solution was no more difficult than integrating a licensed software package.

When ASPs first emerged in the late 1990s, they had a lot of problems with scalability and service levels. Those early ASPs didn’t have the right infrastructure to support "multi-tenancy," or lots of different customers. But the new breed of ASPs in the CRM space has largely mastered the multi-tenancy architecture and service issues.

In fact, these companies seem willing to bend over backward for customers. RightNow completely changed its application so that it could do what British Airways needed with no effect on the ASP’s other customers, which simply continued to use RightNow’s standard application. Realizing that potential customers in other industries such as retail and hospitality would also want to customize FAQs according to different customer segments, RightNow eventually built that functionality into its product.

British Air was also reassured that RightNow could handle its daily traffic by observing the volume the ASP’s other customers were putting on its server. "They were able to show us hard data on their capacity," Bevan says. "They were able to show us what they could do currently and what they were investing in."

In addition, RightNow offered British Air a free trial of its software. But the true test of whether RightNow could handle British Air’s site traffic came immediately after 9/11, when hundreds of thousands of users flocked to the website for information. Bevan says the airline’s call center would never have been able to handle all of those inquiries. "September the 11th cruelly demonstrated that this tool did meet the promises made by RightNow," says Bevan.

Briggs & Stratton, a $1.5 billion manufacturer of engines for lawn mowers, motor boats and snowblowers, has experienced virtually no downtime since it opted to let RightNow host its eService Center application, according to Michael Del Valle, the company’s e-customer support coordinator. He says upgrades also proceed fairly smoothly with the ASP. "You can schedule your upgrade, get a test website, work with the test site and upgrade in a matter of days," he says. "The support from RightNow is solid enough that if you have a problem, the personnel can in many cases fix whatever the problem is."