Well  - like a proud father I need to brag a little….last week TOA’s ETAdirect HTML5 Mobility App won a prize for Best Mobile App from NEOSA. What I can I say…? Very exciting! And even more so because I know what we are working on…this Mobility App…as great as it is…is just the beginning. We have so many great things in the pipe that I wish I could share…but I can’t…:)…suffice it to say that in a year this Mobility App will look like a relic from another age…

Congratulations to our great Mobility App development team.

When I think of the evolving story of software and technology in the last 15 years, the most significant constant has been the continuous push toward more and more democratization of access and platform. Remember when the guys at Sun said “The network is the computer” in the 90s? They’ve been proven 100% correct: the demand for greater freedom from platform, operating system, server and physical connection has driven so much innovation that its impact is felt at every level of society, economy and culture.

At TOA, we have bet our business on the emergence of computing power, and the robust platform capability that will support the growth and strengthening of this trend. HTML5 Mobility (as we call it) is one more ‘brick in the wall’ separating the old technology from the new, and it represents one more aspect of the platform-, device- and location-agnostic trend in the evolution of technology.

At the very heart of the topic is freedom for the user. It’s completely allowing for the disconnect from the dependencies of hardware and from the capabilities of this or that operating system and providing a neutral platform. Talented software engineers can therefore build any application with any degree of depth and relevance inside the browser – which is exactly what HTML5 enables. Leveraging this “playing field leveling” technology, we are taking one more big step toward empowering a kind of user experience that is untethered in every way. And, ultimately, one that is flexible in such a way that it provides maximum value.

These results are no more powerful than when we translate this concept into the mobile browser and most notably a mobile application in the enterprise software realm. Because of the proliferation of devices and the ease of connectivity, we’ve seen an exploding openness to allowing every mobile user to have a mobile device. In fact, as we have discussed in the past here, enterprise users are voting with their pocket books and buying the devices themselves – the consumerization of IT, or more specifically, BYOD. HTML5 Mobility adds a new dimension – it gives enterprises more avenues to communicate and to provide applications to their users without the need to actually manage EACH device.

And it’s robust indeed! We have worked on developing capabilities and functionality that exists only on the installed app at EVERY level of our application without compromise. We offer complete offline persistence – your data AND full functionality (with no compromises on depth) is available to you in the browser, even when you are NOT connected to the Net, or should your browser crashes or computer loses power.

Independent of device, platform or carrier. Not bound by the limitations of the browser. The network really can be the computer – and companies are just starting to understand the benefits, especially in mobile workforce management.

A recent article in the NYTimes asked the question – do GPS devices reduce our ability to self orient? I have asked myself this same question many times as I’ve travelled the world, relying on and marveling at how my Google Maps has helped me navigate unknown places with ease…but with no sense of where I really am in the more traditional geo-spatial sense.

In order to definitively answer that question all you need to do is to get stuck without any connection to GPS in a foreign city on your way to a meeting when you had completely counted on it in advance or worse be in the middle of a GPS navigation and lose connection.

That’s exactly what happened to me a while back in Cologne, Germany. I had arrived there for an important dinner meeting and got off the train at the main railway station. I had my Android with built-in turn-by-turn Google Maps directions with me – this has been a reliable, effective and cheap (i.e. free) provider of voice-activated directions for me since it was launched.  I loved that exclusive Android application and used it a lot.

Upon my arrival in Cologne, I set off in the direction of my meeting (as I had last identified it on GMaps) and wandered into the maze of winding cobblestone streets before I realized that I was not connected to 3G and the map was not working.

It was night and there was no one in the street, I could not find any cabs and there I was…standing in the middle of the city without a mental map of the place and lost. It was an amazing moment for me when I realized just how much I had become dependent on the connectivity and the app on my phone. No sense of place or location…contrasted with a time that I used to know cities by heart after a day.

I finally found someone to ask and they gave me direction to where I needed to go…but it had a lasting impact on my sense of place and convinced me that I should always consult with or have a real map in my back pocket when I set out on a trip to a place I don’t know – so that I can again be really truly independent.

Last week Google announced  a milestone deal with BBVA that should have people at Microsoft even more worried than they probably already are, and pure Cloud enthusiasts like my colleagues at TOA and I ever more excited and confident about the future of pure-play Cloud-based software.

BBVA is a major employer with over one hundred thousands employees. But this is significant not just because of the sheer number of new Google Docs and Gmail users – but mostly because of the network effect.

At TOA we have always ‘practiced what we preached’ and that means that we not only sell Cloud-based enterprise software (SaaS), we also buy and use only Cloud-based software. What that means for us is that we only look for SaaS solutions for our internal needs. We believe firmly that in order to understand the benefits, as well as the limitations of what we sell, we have to experience it like our clients do: as real bon-fide users. So we have been Google Apps users from the moment that these were available for the enterprise and moved our whole mail infrastructure to Google about two years ago. We have followed the evolution of the Google Docs Suite from the moment that Google bought Writely  and watch closely as these applications have become more and more deep and more and more sophisticated and complete. In fact, from a classic enterprise users’ point of view , someone who is not crunching numbers or doing intense graphics and a lot of offline work, there is very little difference today creating text, presentation or spreadsheet documents on Google Docs in comparison to Microsoft Office. In fact, the most amazing aspect of the GDocs Suite is the strong native collaboration capabilities that make it absolutely a killer app for this purpose.

Only one serious gap remains  that has kept us from adopting the GDocs Suite as our one and only productivity tool and that is robust, easy to use offline  capability, access and storage –(full disclosure: I am writing this very post on Word – to be transferred later  - because of that…I’m on a plane with no Wi-Fi).

The only other serious hindrance is people’s mindset.

Office is the standard and people are afraid of deserting the standard. But that’s where the network effect comes in. With companies like GM and BBVA adopting the G-Suite as their mail app and G-Docs as their primary productivity tool (even if for now for internal communications) we will begin to see the conversion of the masses and the tipping point will get ever closer.