Today, TOA announced that it raised $17.2M in a Series D lead by Sutter Hill Ventures with the participation of Tim Draper, Fort Washington and existing shareholders Intel Capital, Draper Triangle Ventures and private investors.

It’s an exciting moment for us  - as we look at the rapidly evolving technology market and see only opportunity at every level and I want to talk a little bit about that.

First and foremost  this is about extending TOA’s leadership in cloud-based on-demand enterprise Software-as-a-Service – or what we call “eSaaS“.

Secondly –  it’s about maximizing the potential of mobile internet and mobility applications.

And third –  it’s about taking advantage of the opportunity of the awakening global market for mobility applications for mobile employees – a previously sleepy market that has been undervalued and underinvested in to date.

1) eSaaS – TOA has near perfected the art of enterprise SaaS. Enterprise SaaS is NOT just about a web-based solution or producing software that’s accessible via a browser – Enterprise SaaS or eSaaS (as I like to call it) –  is about something completely different. It’s about:

• integration – and the availability of the sophisticated tools to allow for the complex interweaving of SaaS with legacy software systems with ease. Emphasis on sophisticated and ease! Without these – there is no chance for a SaaS solution to be viable for the large enterprise.
• flexibility –  the ability to provide a solution that has the kind of malleability to literally morph with the clients’ business and respond to the ever changing business and technological environments that is the reality for most enterprises – definitely OUR clients and their businesses.
• reliability – as we witnessed a few weeks ago with amazon web service big event – providing a system that is 100% there for the enterprise is NOT easy and doing so is a huge responsibility and needs a high degree of expertise. This is not easy to come by or easy to deliver. Don’t let anyone fool you. TOA does it with expertise.
• scalability – the ability to support huge distributed businesses with high volumes, and to continue to support their growth into the long term

In 2004 – when we launched TOA and the first version of ETAdirect, we took enormous inspiration and even guidance from Marc Benioff – we bet our future on many of the ideas he espoused and beyond. We knew that it would be risky to go after the big enterprises with SaaS and that many IT departments would look at us and think that we were out of our minds to try and provide a system for them from outside their firewall.  But the tide of technology is relentless and things have definitely moved in our direction. SaaS is here to stay and more – 10 years from now – it’s going to power the majority of businesses – not only small but medium, large and extra large. We made the right decision at the absolute right time back then to bet on SaaS. Betting on eSaaS as the next frontier was betting beyond SaaS for the SMBs – and it has given us the experience, the expertise and the track record a software company MUST have in order to successfully sell to large enterprise IT.  We are excited about the many amazing new things that we are doing and will be unvaling in the coming months and years.

eSaaS is different from  regular SaaS in very many ways and as software is delivered more and more via the SaaS model – the needs for eSaaS solution to replace the old legacy enterprise software solutions that run businesses today and in the past – will only grow and  become dominant and only way – and TOA is well positioned to expand to meet the challenge and the opportunity.

2) This is about mobility and the Mobile Internet – maybe if you were living in a cave in Tora Bora (which obviously you weren’t)  you might not be aware of the real revolution that is happening in people’s lives. Everyone is connected in multiple ways via multiple devices and many channels. The smart-phone and the tablet is in its infancy as a business device and TOA is well positioned via its early adoption of the smart-phone /  iPad as THE platform of choice and a completely browser-based application to take advantage of many new developments that are here and coming soon. Mobility is king and device  and platform agnostic apps will lead the way to the many platforms we intend to make the most of our early leadership providing eSaaS via the mobile Internet to millions of users worldwide who do work in the field. Those users are the same users who have iPhones and Androids and use them addictively in their personal lives. They expect nothing less from software when they go to work – and yet in many (or most) cases they are still using antiquated systems on antiquated platforms on antiquated devices. Opportunity abounds.

3) Lastly, this is about the needs of the global market of mobile employees – the mobile workforce management software market has been around for a long time but has been, to date,  underserved and undervalued – the convergence of many of the trends that I described above provides a real inflection point for a market that has seen little change in the past decade. TOA’s solution has a patented predictive technology and an approach and completeness that provides relevant and transformative value to the many satisfied customers and users it serves. We want to bring that to every enterprise that has people working in the field. They all deserve the best. The market of mobile employees is huge and they deserve  TOA and we intend to bring it to every corner of the globe.

Thanks to Andy Sheehan from Sutter Hill Ventures who showed immediate and unflagging enthusiasm for us and our vision- I know he sees what we see.  Thanks also to Tim Draper for his great intuition and continued inspiration. A big and special thanks to our long term supporters at Draper Triangle Ventures, Early Stage Partners and Intel Capital, as well as the  private investors and friends who saw the vision from day one and have stuck with us from the start. Lastly – I want to thank our immensely dedicated employees and our great customers – this just validates what they already know.

As Jeff Bezos says: It’s Always Day One!

Stay Tuned!

As creatures of habit and pattern – there are some patterns that we, people, recognize, but  many that we don’t. And though these patterns may stand out to others, we ourselves may be oblivious of them. Maybe we are even in denial of them.

Why?  A way of keeping us from being exposed to too much information, a protection mechanism from things we don’t want to know or  just because we move around our world not always 100% aware of everything we do…

At the end of the day -  it doesn’t really matter because the patterns are there and they can be harnessed for the greater good.

So when Irad and I started TOA Technologies with the goal of solving what is commonly referred to as ‘the cable guy problem’ (or customers waiting at-home from 12-4 or all day for some kind of appointment without knowing when it will actually happen) we thought that, if we could only identify those patterns and connect we could use them to help solve this daily but incredibly annoying and costly problem.

Our assumption was that even in the most dynamic environment – like a field operations environment – there will always be behavior or “performance patterns” that could pretty easily be recognized and documented, ultimately  help better plan, schedule and manage the work-day of the many field service people out there. We thought that by identifying these performance patterns and building a mechanism to communicate them, we could help the companies be more predictive and respectful of everyone’s time. By being able to identify specific performance pattern of the specific people who provide the services or goods – we came to the conclusion that we could accurately predict when an appointment would happen and how long it would take. We could then offer up that information to all the stakeholders in the appointment – the planners, the managers and supervisor, the dispatchers but most importantly to the Customers.

Two weeks ago – after a long 6-year gestation period the US Patent Office finally recognized the uniqueness of our idea and the spefic combination of methodologies and technologies that we combined to solve this problem and awarded us a Patent Number 7,693,735 . The first of many.

I want to thank Irad here for the great work he did in steering this to completion. Though the concepts and the composition of the patent is/was ours jointly, the last two years of negotiations and execution was Irad’s alone. Thanks!

Since we got the patent I have been saying that I now know for sure that those who get a patent deserve a patent. Either because they were truly geniuses who came up with something completely and radically new or because they had the perseverance and the conviction to believe that what they had was unique and fought for it without compromise.  In both cases the award is honestly due.

CNNMoney published a great piece about TOA today. It highlights how we solve the problem of customers waiting at home for a service or delivery without knowing when it will actually happen…! This is another fantastic validation of our unique approach to mobility and mobile workforce management: Focus on the customer, solve the customer pain first – and everything else (including increased efficiencies) will fall into place.

I’m excited to report that TOA Technologies is one the winners of the prestigious  2009 Product of the Year Award by Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine.

“The editors of Customer Interaction Solutions selected companies to receive the esteemed Product of the Year Awards based on their vision, leadership and diligence. For 12 years, Customer Interaction Solutions has recognized the most ground-breaking products by granting this prestigious award to the most deserving companies.  We are so proud to honor the greatest achievements in the advancement of call centers, CRM and teleservices technologies in 2009,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC.

Wow! I’m so very proud!  Thank you to our great worldwide team!