Software developed for ISPs can help you streamline your business, aligning your systems with your work processes in a challenging but rewarding endeavor that Jupitermedia and the internet industry are calling business IT alignment. Here's an example.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 8, 2007]

The government is paying attention to data. As rules and regulations are handed down, companies are forced to do specific things. They need to pass an audit for everything from obtaining a merchant account to closing a deal with a new customer. If you're an ISP, you can be directly affected the law, and you can be indirectly affected by it.

You could be forced to retain e-mails by a new law in the U.S. or Europe, or you could be forced to have a VoIP system that can be accessed by the Department of Justice (details on how the VoIP system can be made available to the Federal government are still lacking, however).

You can also be indirectly affected. Your data center may need to be HIPAA complaint when your customer starts working with a hospital, for example. Your data center may need to have certain data capabilities if a customer has an IPO and needs to conform to Sarbanes Oxley.

Whatever you do, you'll need to say how you do what you do. You'll need to have a procedure, you'll need to have a set of rules showing that you a specific thing in a specific way.

All of this can be made easier with software.

Really annoying stuff is the mother of invention
Beachwood, Ohio-based TOA Technologies can help you do this for a piece of your business: your road warriors. If you have an install team, a bucket truck, or a delivery van, TOA Technologies' ETAdirect 3 can help you and your customers keep track of where your people are and what they're doing. The company calls its product a "service delivery hub."

Yuval Brisker, CEO and co-founder, says the company began with a commonly experienced frustration. "At the time, I lived in Manhattan, and I suffered through several seriously delinquent appointments. My partner (co-founder) and I came from a billing and customer care background and we thought, how can any corporation, especially one whose business is moving data, force its customers to stay home for a whole day? The same is true for low tech businesses, like pest control."

Companies talk about serving customers, but place their own needs first. "Service providers talk about customer service, but do what works for them, and that's not respectful to their customers."

SaaS
Rather than develop an application that would be deployed within the service provider's network, the company decided to build something that would be hosted by TOA Technologies. "It was 2003, and we were intrigued by the buzz around salesforce.com," says Brisker. "We were intrigued by the idea of putting mission critical software that could be accessed in the browser by the company and by the customer."

It delivers, Brisker says. "Our system effectively creates a real time picture of what's in the field. You can look at our system and see where people are. You can also obtain operational data. You can see people's schedules, see if people are running late, flag appointments in relation to time. It tracks everything in relation to time. It tracks each tech or delivery person and predicts how long it will be until they arrive at their next job and communicates this to the customers giving them real time appointment status information."

So part of the system has to involve pushing data to small devices? "Our system is WAP-enabled and XHTML-enabled. Our business concept is that we cannot tell anyone what device they should have." Therefore, the system has to be able to deliver data to any PDA or data-enabled cell phone.

"Our small customers have 20 or 30 trucks in the field. We don't force them to buy new equipment or swap out their Nextel phones. They can use the Nextel phones as phones and also to access the mobile workforce system via their phone web browser."

Surely one problem with such software is that it places a data entry burden on a workforce that is constantly under time pressure? Brisker says that TOA Technologies works with each customer to design a portal that minimizes the amount of data entry required by the people in the field. "We pare it down to the minimum. We go through a business analysis. We say, 'let's clearly define a normal day to day workflow for every person in the field, so that it's a natural process to use the system.' There's no intensive training required. It'll be a simple input of one or two letter, or (with XHTML) a pull down menu."

The system can still deliver complex data to users back at the base. "The back end user has a completely Ajax-based interface with drag and drop and all the bells and whistles."

So it's like skinning an app? "We don't customize; we configure. We have a configuration engine, but all of our customers so far want us to do the configuration and are willing to pay for it."

If it's SaaS, you're constantly upgrading the software? "We do incremental upgrades. We do quarterly or seasonal upgrades like Salesforce.com. When we do have a version change other than the version number change (for example, changing from version 3.2 on Sunday night to version 3.3 on Monday morning), the customer will not notice any difference."

Business IT alignment
Jupitermedia feels that the changing role of IT is so important that we've got a website devoted to it: bITa Planet, for business-IT alignment. That means that the software that the business works with has to change as fast as the business changes. It's not easy, but if done right, makes everything work better, faster, and easier. It's about working hard in advance to alleviate the weight of work in the future.

Brisker says that ideas like bITa and SaaS have made it easier to sell his company's idea now than in the past. In fact, he claims, his sales team can often approach the operations team directly, bypassing IT. That's because the lines between the strategy team and IT planning team are increasingly blurred.

The plan
The company operates two data centers in the U.S. and is opening a data center in Madrid to support its European customers.

"We're first and foremost a support company. We can differentiate on price," Brisker says, "but ultimately we're a support company that helps our customers manage their business better. That said, of course you cannot even pass go without a hot development cycle, an innovative solution, and good technology."

The solution is based on open source products. Its foundation is LAMP.

Now the company is focusing on selling to SMBs, having won several large customers, such as Cox Communications. It is also working on building partnerships with VARs that specialize in specific industries. For example, it works with Denver, Colo.-based BATMANN Consulting, a VAR with a strong record in the cable TV industry.

Another vertical that TOA Technologies is doing well in, Brisker says, is furniture retailing.

Pricing and operation
TOA Technolgies negotiates the price. Generally, it charges an up front integration fee plus a sort of revenue share, where it takes a percentage of each transaction facilitated by its product.

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