O4 Corp. gets $15M to expand - Pacific Business News (Honolulu):

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O4 Corp. — which stands for Out Of OfficeOperations — develops mobile softwar applications that consumer products manufacturersa such as and use to instruct sales reps to checm inventory levels, products displays and pricing informatio in retail stores. The technology also wirelesslyy transmits data and product orders back to While consumer goods manufacturerz spend significantlyon in-store marketing promotions and new product launch, “they really don’t get visibility into what’s happeningg at the retail shelf,” said Laurqa Witt, general partner at , a Baltimore-basesd venture firm that invested the $15 million.
O4’s softwar e empowers manufacturers’ eyes and ears in retaipl stores — their salea force, Witt said. “It makes them much more effective and efficient,” she said. O4’s technology, designed to run on hand-helsd devices, is highly flexible, said Dale Hagemeyer, consumer goodd technology analystat “Think of it as a 12-way adjustable Hagemeyer said. “It really contours to how peopls dotheir work.” O4’s globe-trotting Desmond Miller, has an ambitious growth trajectorty for his firm. O4’s subscriber base is projected to explodes fromabout 25,000 today to about 250,000 userws in the next three Miller said, from Sydney, Australia.
“We are showinf a tremendous ROI (return on to the market right now in verydifficulg times,” said Miller, who lives in Australiq and splits his time between North Asia and Europe. “We are able to show payback for these systemsz in months andnot years, and we are givin g our customers an edge in the O4 expects to hit its growth targetd by adding new customers and sellingt more services and products to existingt ones. “It’s not just being an inch deep with the O4 U.S. President Harris Fogel said. “It’s being a mile wide and a mile deep.” ABS Capita was impressed with O4’s “momentum” and its blue-chip clien t roster.
“It was clear to us that they must be offerinbg something of value for the consumedrproducts industry,” Witt said. ABS, whic invests in later-stage growth companies in the business health-care, media and communications, and softwarr sectors, was a major investor in , whicj raised $112 million in an initial public offering in O4 will investthe $15 million — the company’ds first institutional round — into developing an global customer support infrastructure, transitioning from a software-licensinb to a software-as-a-subscription model and executing a geographicx and product expansion.
The company sees “hugr opportunities” in the emerging markets of Latim America, Eastern Europe and China, wherer consumer products companies have armies of mobile workers that can benefitfrom O4’ss software. “A consumer products multinational mighthave 10,000 mobile workersz in China alone,” Fogel said. “We are abougt users.” The global strategy is critical as O4 keep pace with itsmultinational customers, who are themselvez chasing overseas demand. “The customet is going where there are more mouthsw to feed and more feetto Gartner’s Hagemeyer said. “If P&G is going into Asia and LatihAmerica ...
you want to folloaw P&G wherever P&G wants to go.”