April 11, 2013 by Yuval Brisker
As a co-founder and CEO of an amazing and fast growing SaaS company, I have the honor of being part of many great moments – large and small - in the life of the company, moments that usually mark an interesting and exciting shift in our business. Yesterday was such a moment - a milestone for our business, the coming together of a lot of what we’ve been working towards over the years, but really much more than that. What really makes this moment so exciting is that, I believe, it is also a landmark representing the sea change that’s happening in enterprise software.
Telefónica, a global provider of telecommunication services, an innovator, has selected TOA Technologies to deploy our industry-leading SaaS field service management solution to their global mobile workforce – a deployment that is ultimately going to span 24 countries. This could well be the largest footprint of an enterprise cloud software solution ever. They’ve made this decision after carefully surveying the market of existing on-premise solutions vendors – and decided to take the bold leap into the future and select TOA.
Amidst my pride, I can’t help but look back to when Irad Carmi, my co-founder and our CTO, founded TOA with the idea that one day every company – extra-large, large, medium and small – would need, and be using, software like ours by being built in the browser and managed as a service in the cloud (and designed with a clear focus on the user, providing tangible total value and built for partnership). We never had a doubt that this day would come. Today is special – because when a company of the size and reach of Telefónica has come to the conclusion that nothing but a true, native SaaS solution would do. That’s big.
If we’ve been waiting for any single customer to signify the ‘Crossing of the Chasm’ of enterprise software – from on-premise to the cloud. This is the clear marker.
Why did Telefónica go for the cloud? What is the lesson here?
- Scale: A cloud solution represents scalability and the ability to grow without the headache of buying new hardware and managing the growth. Scale and growth are built in.
- Standardization: A cloud solution like TOA’s represents the best way for companies with a large geographic and operational footprint to standardize their business processes and customer experience.
- Reliability: The solution that we and other cloud software vendors provide is the most reliable of all enterprise software solution. It’s the lifeblood of our business – and without reliability, cloud software would not have a business.
- Long-term innovation: This is assured. Cloud software is service. It’s always current, always the latest version and always reflects the latest and greatest thinking of the developers who develop the solution.
Ultimately, though, it’s all about partnership and the enormously positive people who work with us and believe in our company and TOA’s solutions. Our global team is expert at forging professional, collaborative and lasting partnerships with customers. And these partnerships are further enabled through our software service which keeps us close. This gives all of us at TOA the opportunity to work with the business and technology leaders of great companies – and in this case an important Tier 1 telecommunications service provider with an incredible global reach.
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.
September 18, 2012 by Yuval Brisker
Today we are launching our biggest event ever at Dreamforce - the salesforce.com annual convention in San Francisco and the largest Cloud technology event of the year.
Wow. What an exciting and beautiful moment for all of us – presenting TOA in the most expressive light, showcasing our great company.
At Dreamforce we will take our place among the technology leaders - that we are!
With the convergence of many of the great innovations of the past 15 years – the internet, mobile communications, the Cloud, powerful multifunctional hand-held computing devices and social and collaborative communications - we can honestly say that we in the midst of a revolution. A social and economic revolution of the highest order.
The TOA Team has been an inventor of great breadth and innovator of the first order from the moment of inception. We’ve had a vision, we’ve had a dream, and we’ve followed that vision to where we are today – a technology leader with tier-1 enterprise customers worldwide.
TOA’s founding idea is as relevant today as it was at our inception – the idea of a time-based, predictive, analytics-based solution built on a flexible, configurable, pattern recognition platform that would easily integrate with legacy backends and stay relevant to our customers business for the long term.
TOA’s amazing people have been consistently pushing every envelope, breaking down every barrier, going beyond every technical and creative limitation to deliver one of the world’s most robust, flexible and reliable Cloud-based solutions available anywhere and in any segment of the software market.
All this has resulted in consistent high double digit percentage growth, continuous geographic and industry expansion, and enviable customer retention. TOA Technologies is a leader in every possible way.
No doubt that TOA is now primed for broad recognition and a more significant exposure – one that becomes our leadership position.
With the formal initiation of our partnership with salesforce.com and the first joint customer – Racktime (see Press Release) we are letting everyone know about the TOA Sun that is shining behind the Cloud Revolution.
Our theme is decidedly befitting of the location.
San Francisco was, after all, the heart of the ‘first’ social revolution of the Nineteen Sixties and is now the center of the sea change that is happening in the world of technology – the ‘second’ social revolution or ‘The New Social Revolution’.
‘The New Social Revolution’ that brought about by the convergence of these great forces – The Cloud, Mobile (Internet and Devices) and the Social/Collaborative waves is one that is truly worthy of a big party and we are holding one in San Francisco this week….
The theme we’ve enthusiastically embraced is derived from the sunny flower-power happenings of the amazing 60′s. Period that brought about great changes that are still felt today and remain in the collective consciousness as pivotal to many of the best things about our world today, ultimately converging with the great technology wave in the Silicon Valley that we know today (anyone reading Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography will be aware of the clear connection between 60s counter-culture and the root of companies like Apple). All this emanated from in and around San Francisco and resulted in what was called
’The Summer of Love’. TOA is going to San Francisco in the last days of Summer 2012 and bringing that 60s theme and its revitalization message to the streets of San Fran!
We are reintroducing the TOA brand as “The Sun Brand”… appropriate for the light and energy that it produces and the direct connection that it has with Time. Iit is after all the ultimate Time Piece and will now become more associated with the TOA Brand.
“The Sun behind the Cloud” not only connotes something that is foundational to the Cloud Revolution, but is also about the light and the warmth and the vibrant energy that we as a company represent, both technologically and philosophically.
We are putting together a presence at
Salesforce.com that will be remembered. Here Comes the Sun & Let the Sun Shine In kind of event with as much of a hoopla as we can create…bringing the 60s back to the Bay and into Moscone Convention Center. With our TOA branded Painted VW Vans both on the streets of SF and in the convention hall…Modern Hippies in the streets of San Fran around the convention center, dancing in the streets wearing TOA clothes and handing out TOA gear and invites to our booth… and one of the largest booths at the show with the VW buss inside plus 60s music and Love and Peace and a New Dawn. We’ll be giving seminars and holding forth, handing out TOA’s Ice Cream specially created for the event by
Humphrey Slocomb… making noise… being heard… this is what it’s all about. We will be blogging about the event live from the floor as it develops! Follow us at our Event Site at
LetTheSunIn.com or on
twitter.com/letsunin
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…
