Oracle announced it will be acquiring RightNow Technologies, a company that provides cloud-based customer service. The deal is for about $1.5 billion.

The transaction has already been unanimously approved by Oracle’s board, though still subject to regulatory approvals. It’s expected to close by late 2011/early 2012.

“RightNow’s products add leading customer experience capabilities that help empower companies to interact with and provide a consistent experience to customers across channels,” said RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte. “We look forward to combining our complementary capabilities along with maintaining and expanding our presence in Bozeman, Montana in order to better service our customers.”

“Oracle is moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud,” said Thomas Kurian, EVP, Oracle Development. “RightNow’s leading customer service cloud is a very important addition to Oracle’s Public Cloud.”

Oracle has an interesting presentation available (pdf) looking at how it intends to implement RIghtNow into its strategy. Here’s a flow chart that shows the B2C Plan:

And the B2B plan:

RightNow is a 1,000-employee company headquartered in Bozeman, Montana. Its services are already used by about 2,000 organizations.