…And buy a lot…knowingly paying premium prices for these companies because they KNOW that the price is worth it long term!

By taking over as many enterprise-focused Cloud companies that will assure that at the least, they have many offerings in the New World that will survive the ultimate reshaping of the enterprise software space as older solution get to end of life. At this point – it seems that this strategy to own as many entreprise SaaS/Cloud software providers as possible is more important whether ultimately all those solutions will work together effectively.

I think this is the right strategy for SAP – as it will assure their sales people have something significant to sell 10 years from now –  because most likely the old legacy products will not moving off the shelf any longer by then.

“Social” in the workplace is a whole other animal and goes well beyond just “connecting people” – which is still ‘the definition’ and is important but for many other reasons.  In fact, as many companies who have tried to create social for the enterprise know… doing this right is hard! And when I say ‘right’ I mean right on the scale of Facebook. If you think about that scale…82% of all Facebook users are adults in the prime of their life and in the workplace.  This, according to the latest Facebook membership numbers,  should translate to an audience of over 700 million potential users  - who could theoretically be using Facebook for work purposes…but probably aren’t. Why? Because at work it’s really not about the ‘usual’ Facebook things…photos, restaurant reviews, sharing thoughts. book and movie recommendations, travel and status updates…at work…it’s about connecting the dots not just the people. And frankly – no one has figured that out till now and clearly the potential is huge.

Well today, TOA is taking the first step towards creating a social tool for the collaborating global mobile workplace . The first real step in social, context-aware, location-based collaboration!!! And that is huge step.

What does that mean…???

A lot of things. A lot of great things.

Stay tuned.

It’s great that people are standing up and demanding a real improvement in customer service. Mr. Lewis proposes giving fines or paying bonuses according to service providers’ performance. From my point of view – it’s a short term solution to a much deeper-seated challenge to delivering timely, quality service.

TOA has done a lot of research into what people care about regarding a service that’s being delivered, and I can say that people are not really interested in getting a bonus or receiving compensation when service is not delivered in a timely manner, because for most people, what it  really comes down to is respect – respect for commitments made and respect for the value of someone’s time. If it seems simple – it is. It’s why when we go to our customers and prospects, we make sure that they know it’s not just about maximizing and optimizing their field force ability to do work on any given day or how many truck rolls they can eliminate –  it’s about time and the customer experience.

There will always be an element of holding businesses accountable for the service they provide to customers. But the more that service organizations can open up to their customers and just say, company to person, person to person, “this is when your appointment will start and end” without making them play a frustrating waiting game, that’s where the trust and long-term value based relationship is built.

Congratulations to our great Mobility App development team.