Archive for the ‘innovation’ Category
February 13, 2013 by Yuval Brisker
Marc Andreessen gave a fascinating interview last week to TechCruch’s Alexis Tsotsis validating what we’ve known for about 9 years:
That enterprise software is going to go to the Cloud and only One Company in each sector will dominate.
“Any piece of software for which there is a piece of installed software for which there’s a web or a cloud equivalent, I think is in real trouble, and I think that is not becoming clear”
“I don’t know if it’s a year, two years, four years…All the trends that we are talking about are going to keep continuing. Nothing is going to stop consumerization of the enterprise. Nothing is going to stop Bring Your Own Device. Nothing is going to stop Sotfware-as-a-Service. Nothing is going to stop Cloud. All those things are just going to keep going.”
Highly recommended reading.
October 9, 2012 by Yuval Brisker
It’s Tuesday the 9th of October and I’m in the Citta Maravilhosa – Rio de Janeiro!
Today The Sun Shines especially bright in Rio – heralding the dawning of the new age for Service Everywhere™ in Brazil and in Latin America.
Yesterday – TOA Technologies announced that GVT chose TOA over all our legacy competitors to power the transformation of its customer and field service operations.
By deploying ETAdirect rapidly across its footprint (in 4 months instead of 18 months offered by the legacy providers) GVT will be able to quickly better optimize and better manage all field service across Brazil. But more than that GVT’s executive management was also focused on continuing to advance their market leadership and competitive differentiation by focusing on enhancing precision of appointment and customer information and enabling advanced automated communications with it’s nationwide growing customer base! ETAdirect will enable all that and more!
We are so proud to be in partnership with GVT a visionary and innovative company that is also the fastest-growing telecom in Brazil. This is a company that has been thinking out-of-the-box it from day one rising from start-up just over 10 years ago to be a dominant force in technology and telecom in this great country.
GVT is one of the slew of companies that TOA is partnering with across Latin America in a surge of new customers that we are seeing across this amazing continent. There are many more new Latin American customer announcements in store in the coming weeks and months, reflecting the the leadership position that TOA and other native, pure Cloud-based technology providers are seeing in the fast growing and technologically progressive countries in Latin America The Nexus of Forces that TOA is smack dab in the middle of – Cloud, Mobile and Social – is capturing the imagination and the ambition of visionary leaders across the continent and we are right there with them. Leaders such as GVT’s amazing CIO, Alessandra Bomura Nogueira, who is a great new TOA customer and will be discussing her view of why superior customer relationship management and field service management are so interconnected at Futurecomm here in Rio tomorrow. These combined mega-trends are transforming the way business is being done at so many levels – but none with more verve and potential than the world of mobile employees, and field and customer service and with no more energy than here.
August 27, 2012 by Yuval Brisker
I came across this from Gartner which I thought was particularly relevant to many things that I have been thinking (and talking) about recently:
A Nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information — is building upon and transforming user behavior while creating new business opportunities…Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders. As such, the Nexus of Forces is the basis of the technology platform of the future.
“In the Nexus of Forces, information is the context for delivering enhanced social and mobile experiences,” said Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner. “Mobile devices are a platform for effective social networking and new ways of work. Social links people to their work and each other in new and unexpected ways. Cloud enables delivery of information and functionality to users and systems. These forces of the Nexus are intertwined to create a user-driven ecosystem of modern computing.”
This is a convergence that is affecting all aspects of our daily life – and work life is not excluded from that. I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that TOA Technologies – as a provider of cloud-based mobile technology that delivers information via integrated collaborative, social and context-aware applications to business users worldwide – is at the intersection of the Nexus of Forces. When you add another element – predictive analytics (which, for us, is a facet of Big Data…) – I’m confident we are in the middle of a seismic shift in the technology landscape that will dominate the world of computing for the foreseeable future.
July 2, 2012 by Yuval Brisker
With Amazon Web Services going down last week for an undisclosed amount of time, I thought it was time to reflect on the many facets of what it means to being ‘cloud-based’ and the idea that “All Clouds Are Not Born Equal.”
In fact, cloud computing encompasses a number of different services that share one common characteristic – that they are not ‘here’ but delivered via the Internet (which is really ‘the cloud’)!
TOA Technologies is an expert in what is called software-as-a-service (SaaS), which involves the supply of discrete applications to users via the Internet. These applications can be geared either to business users (such as an accounting applications, HRIS applications, CRM, or our solution – ETAdirect) or to consumers (such as an application for storing and sharing personal photographs or email).
Though there are many similarities between these two types of applications, there are many differences. And as the ‘net and the cloud evolve, it has become increasingly clear that even within the identical group of cloud-based applications (business or consumer) there may be considerable variables about what it actually means to be ‘in the cloud’ or ‘cloud-based’.
TOA’s world – the world of mobile workforce management and enterprise mobility solutions – is one where the application as a whole is a critical link in the chain of delivering goods and services, assuring revenue and customer satisfaction. In fact, it’s the primary tool that many companies’ mobile employees use to get and do their work. So bottom line: It’s company mission-critical and there is no way it can go down. The data is also sensitive and critical and there is no way to entrust it to a third party. So let’s consider then what ‘the cloud’ means to the enterprise buyer/customer where – not all clouds are born equal or should be considered equal.
When looking for and at the different options to purchase a business, mission-critical SaaS solution or what I call eSaaS – enterprise SaaS – I will try and answer the question: what is it that needs to be 100% guaranteed – what separates ‘the men from the boys’ and defines the true characteristics of a enterprise-ready cloud solution that can be trusted to serve companies with the same degree of reliability and sense of security that they had when they bought on-premise software?
In a series of posts that I will be writing – I will discuss the differences between the clouds and what’s important for an enterprise buyer to focus on when looking at the different options:
- What is the difference between public vs. private (or semi-private) cloud (meaning the well-known providers of cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) ) and others vs. buying an application that’s hosted and run in a semi-private or private cloud
- Data security
- Reliability and service level guarantees
- Command and control…who ACTUALLY is responsible for the app…(or The Buck Stops Here!)
- And more…
