Following a beat-and-raise quarter last night for online software vendor Salesforce’s (CRM), the rewards are not what you might expect, with the shares down $11.60, or 17.8 percent, at $53.73. The company’s forecast for a profit of 34 cents to 35 cents for the current quarter, excluding its cost to acquire privately held Instranet, was unimpressive to the Street. But the main worry is that the company’s deferred revenue balance–meaning sales for which it has received payments that have not been recorded as revenue on the income statement–at the end of last quarter signals that new business signings may be slipping.

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Half-a-billion-dollar (market cap) Rightnow Technologies (RNOW), which sells software over the Web to automate customer support, could be threatened by this morning’s announcement from Salesforce.com (CRM) that it’s buying privately held Instranet for software to expand in the call center market, according to a report out today from JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens.

“Historically, Salesforce.com has not had an effective knowledge-base solution, giving RightNow a major advantage in business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles, which emphasize self-service,” writes Walravens.

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Salesforce.com (CRM), which is mainly known for software that helps sales executives track and manage customer prospects, today said it paid $31.5 million in cash for Instranet, a 10-year-old company based in Chicago that makes software to improve product support. Salesforce plans to move Instranet’s software, which is usually installed on customers’ computers, onto its hosted computer facilities. Instranet already has some impressive customers using its software, a lot of it in call center operations, including Comcast (CMCSA). The company’s software is used by 350,000 call center agents around the world. When I asked the company if they will be able to sell product support software as distinct from customer relationship management tools, they noted that Salesforce has already been selling form of support software for four years.

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