TOA Technologies

Overview

TOA Technologies was a cloud-based field-service management software company founded in 2003, which Oracle agreed to acquire on July 31, 2014 for an undisclosed sum (Global Venturing). Its software let enterprises monitor the flow of field-service requests, schedule service appointments, and run analytics over inventories, service windows and field operations (PCWorld). The acquisition was Oracle’s bid for the “last mile” of customer service — and, as PCWorld headlined it, “a strike against Salesforce.com” (PCWorld).

A $96 million company with no public price tag

TOA was a heavily venture-backed company: $96.2 million raised in total, including a $66 million Series E led by Technology Crossover Ventures in July 2013, a $17.2 million Series D in 2011 featuring Intel Capital, TCV, Sutter Hill Ventures, Draper Triangle Ventures and Fort Washington Capital Partners, and a $13 million Series C in 2008 that brought Intel in (Global Venturing). The Oracle deal gave Intel Capital its exit — yet neither side ever disclosed the price (Global Venturing, PCWorld). For a company with that much institutional capital behind it, the permanently secret valuation is itself unusual in enterprise software M&A.

ETAdirect and the one-hour window

TOA’s flagship product, ETAdirect, measured field workers’ activity “every minute of every day,” tracking progress and performance and feeding the data into a predictive analytics engine that estimated when a technician would arrive at the next appointment (VentureBeat). The result: a customer’s wait window narrowed from the industry-standard four-to-eight hours to one hour — and the service provider arrived within that window 96% of the time (VentureBeat). TOA said customers like Dish, Virgin Media, Cox and Blue Ridge Communications reported a 40% decrease in distance driven per appointment, a 75% reduction in overtime, and a 47% increase in jobs per day — saving an estimated $5,000 to $20,000 per field employee per year (VentureBeat). The Ohio-based company grew fast on that pitch: annual contract value rose 444% between 2008 and 2012, and the number of new customers doubled from 2011 to 2012 (VentureBeat). Its customer base spanned cable and telecom (Dish, Virgin Media, Cox, Blue Ridge), home healthcare, home services, utilities and retail (VentureBeat). Co-founder and CEO Yuval Brisker framed the bet around an IDC projection of 1.3 billion mobile employees worldwide by 2015, all needing tools to “do their work better and more efficiently” (VentureBeat).

The battle for field service

Oracle’s motive was competitive: Salesforce had been building out its Service Cloud through acquisitions and relied on partners like ServiceMax and ClickWorkforce for field-service capabilities, and TOA gave Oracle a weapon of its own (PCWorld). Constellation Research analyst Ray Wang told PCWorld that “there’s a battle for field service,” and that TOA’s “claim to fame is its algorithms” — “pretty sharp in optimizing when to send a rep, how many calls to schedule,” narrowing a cable-company service window “down to the hour instead of wasting your time” (PCWorld). Oracle folded TOA into its cloud ERP and customer-service applications, and — TechTimes reported — severed TOA’s existing Salesforce integration, replacing it with Oracle’s own cloud services (TechTimes). The logic was end-to-end: by integrating TOA with Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle could coordinate face-to-face service interactions “from the contact center to service scheduling and delivery,” while the ERP Cloud integration gave field teams better information at lower operating cost (TechTimes). TOA’s three software offerings covered the whole loop — predicting tight service windows, dispatching technicians, monitoring field work in real time, and tracking company resources (TechTimes). Global Venturing framed the deal as Oracle adding TOA’s field-service software directly to its cloud product offering — a single cloud stack for a problem Oracle’s rivals still solved with partners (Global Venturing).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state the acquisition price — it was never disclosed, and any figure floating on deal databases is unverified. It does not name TOA’s founders, founding city or current “Oracle Field Service” product branding, none of which were confirmed from fully-read independent sources. The claim that Oracle cut TOA’s Salesforce integration comes from a single outlet (TechTimes) and is stated with that attribution; whether the decoupling was immediate or phased was not verified. The link to Salesforce reflects the sourced competitive and integration relationship as reported — TOA was positioned against Salesforce’s field-service stack — not a claim about either company’s current products.