Oracle has acquired TOA Technologies

Oracle on Thursday announced itwas acquiring 500-employee TOA Technologies for an undisclosed sum. TOA Technologies offers a cloud service that manages “field service” employees, such as fleets delivery drivers or repair technicians l (i.e. the cable guy). Oracle will add TOA to its cloud, stitching it into Oracle’s cloud Enterprise Resource Planning apps (ERP). ERP is financial planning software. Although Oracle’s longstanding rival SAP is the company best known for ERP software, this acquisition is less about SAP and more about Oracle’s latest No. 1 rival: Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is best known for its cloud software that helps salespeople do their jobs. But it also has cloud software for other corporate jobs including something called “Service Cloud” for customers service people. When a customer service rep needs to dispatch a repair person, Service Cloud taps into third-party apps for that, reports Computerworld. Options include ServiceMax, ClickWorkforce, or TOA. TOA built a version of its software on Salesforce’s cloud, Force.com, made specifically for Salesforce.com’s customers. So, by buying TOA, Oracle not only gets its own field service cloud, it gains leads for a chunk of Salesforce’s customers, those using TOA with Salesforce.com. Oracle wants those Salesforce.com customers. “We are Salesforce.com’s primary competitor … and we are going to pass Salesforce in cloud,” CEO Larry Ellison told analysts during the company’s last quarterly conference call.