O4 Corp. gets $15M to expand - Atlanta Business Chronicle:

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O4 Corp. — which standse for Out Of OfficeOperations — develops mobilw software applications that consumer products manufacturers such as and use to instruct sales reps to checkj inventory levels, products displays and pricing information in retail stores. The technology also wirelessly transmitsw data and product orders backto headquarters. While consume r goods manufacturers spend significantlyon in-storer marketing promotions and new product launch, “they realluy don’t get visibility into what’s happening at the retail said Laura Witt, general partnefr at , a Baltimore-based venture firm that invested the $15 million.
O4’s software empowers manufacturers’ eyes and ears in retaill stores — their sales Witt said. “It makes them much more effectivdand efficient,” she said. O4’s technology, designed to run on hand-helde devices, is highly flexible, said Dale consumer goods technology analystat “Think of it as a 12-wahy adjustable seat,” Hagemeyer said. “It reallty contours to how people dotheir work.” O4’s globe-trotting chief, Desmonxd Miller, has an ambitiou s growth trajectory for his firm.
O4’sw subscriber base is projected to explode fromabout 25,00 today to about 250,00 users in the next three years, Miller from Sydney, Australia. “We are showingf a tremendous ROI (return on investment) to the market righft now in verydifficult times,” said Miller, who lives in Australias and splits his time between North America, Asia and Europe. “Wed are able to show payback for these systemse in months andnot years, and we are giving our customersw an edge in the marketplace.” O4 expects to hit its growthg targets by adding new customers and selling more service and products to existing ones. “It’x not just being an inch deep with the O4 U.S.
President Harris Fogel said. “It’ s [about] being a mile wide and a mile ABS Capital was impressedwith O4’s and its blue-chip client roster. “It was cleaer to us that they must be offerin something of value for the consumeeproducts industry,” Witt said. ABS, which invest in later-stage growth companies in the business services, media and communications, and software sectors, was a majoe investor in , which raised $112 million in an initial public offerinhgin mid-April.
O4 will invest the $15 milliob — the company’s first institutional round — into developinf an around-the-clock, global customer support infrastructure, transitioning from a software-licensingb to a software-as-a-subscription model and executingb a geographic andproduct expansion. The companh sees “huge opportunities” in the emerging markets of Latijn America, Eastern Europe and China, whered consumer products companies have armies of mobile workerzs that can benefitfrom O4’s software. “A consumer productw multinational mighthave 10,000 mobilwe workers in China alone,” Fogel said. “We are about users.
” The global strateghy is critical as O4 keeps pace with itsmultinationalp customers, who are themselves chasing overseaas demand. “The customer is going wheres there are more mouths to feed and more feetto Gartner’s Hagemeyer said. “Iv P&G is going into Asia and LatibAmerica ... you want to folloe P&G wherever P&G wants to go.” Rolling into new brings with itchallenges — including findinb the right implementation partners and employees who know the marketplace and culture. O4 must also tweak its productws tosuit customers’ needs overseas.
Equipping 10,000o mobile workers in China with Windows-based for instance, might be too complezx and expensive, Fogel said. So, O4 is adaptin g its software to work on more prevalentwireless hardware. In its markety space, O4 is the more nimblwe David — competing with Goliaths like SAPand “Right now [O4 is] kind of the dandyh in the space,” Hagemeyer said. “Theh are talked about and lots ofmind share.” The local company, must keep innovating — even as it scales — to keep from gettinb overrun.
“It’s not like there’s a black box out It’s fairly easy for a company to hire awaysomeonre else’s talent to figure out how they do what they do,” Hagemeye r said. “So, O4 has to keep inventing and otherwise two years from now SAP or Oracles willcatch up.”