RightNow Technologies is following in the footsteps of fellow software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor Salesforce.com by moving to a quarterly release schedule.

The customer relationship management (CRM) vendor, which boasts blue-chip customers including British Airways and EasyGroup, will today make its 8.1 release available and will make future releases every three months, as does Salesforce with its seasonal Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter releases.

“It gives our customers more predictability and the change management is a little bit easier,” said RightNow products vice-president David Vap.

“There’s a pretty strong trend towards trickling technology so from now everything is broken down into projects and if one is not completed the release still occurs and the project slips to the next release.”

However, Vap said it will continue to differentiate from Salesforce by not mandating customers move to the latest versions, because, he argued, being forced to accept new releases could cause customers disruption.

“If you’re into tax time, you can put off the upgrade,” he said.

Andy Botha, chief operating officer of HR service provider and RightNow customer Ceridian, said “The test will be how well their dev teams can deal with more regular testing and releases without impacting quality but I think it’s the right direction to move in.”

The 8.1 release sees the debut of RightNow Connect, a service-oriented architecture platform for plugging in integration with processes, data and other applications. It includes .Net, Java and web services developer tools.

RightNow has also upgraded its Chat service.