New Technologies Reduce Costs, But You Still Need to Track Them!

By Tanya Seda, Chief Strategy Officer, Network Control

Over the past few years, we have been kept busy by our customers upgrading networks to more complicated infrastructures and complex budgets. As a result, Telecom (Technology) Expense Management, or TEM, is now a necessary practice for enterprises of all sizes. The need for TEM practices to keep up with fast moving technical advances and extremely complex telecom infrastructures which include extensive usage of mobile and smart devices. Additionally, the volume of information being exchanged across the networks has exponentially increased over the years. Below are three main reasons for the growth:

1. Cloud-Based TEM

With the fast-paced “cloud first” initiative seen in many enterprises today, it is critical to have a TEM who can provide excellent efficiency, cost benefits, visibility and operational functions in this new arena. We’re seeing more and more offloading of enterprise IT operations moving to their TEM so they can focus on core business processes and free up internal resources.

2. International Growth

The rise of mobile devices has combined with international growth to transform the way businesses operate. Enterprises are trying to improve their technology and bring together dispersed business units under a converged network design. At the same time, employees push network demands to leverage their networks globally. This creates technical and cost complexity throughout the network. As these complexities grow, we see more demand for better visibility of all assets, regardless of where they are.

Managing a global workforce creates a complex environment. Managing endpoints, connections and services over a global network is incredibly difficult to control. Telecom carriers are in a state of disruption as new technologies and capabilities come to the forefront and they try to keep up. This adds to the complications created in an international footprint and drives the need for more effective TEM products and services.

3. Complex manual processes

With the convergence of technologies, we have seen something as seemingly simple as identifying why “legacy” calls are performing poorly morph into a complicated analysis about network bottlenecks and determining if the VoIP or MPLS network has to be upgraded. An enterprise can easily spend too much money in these areas and technology convergence of the old and new makes it difficult to locate where a problem resides.

A TEM solution can track all these services down to usage elements and service contracts to help the enterprise identify exactly what they are paying for relative to what they actually need—a necessity as communications and data technologies converge.

Cloud, international and IT-telecom convergence all highlight increased complexity in the telecom space. The speed of converged services coming online have resulted in changes to enterprise WANs, and regulations and new, emerging communications technologies are coming together to add even more complications. We are finding that many enterprises are still using manual processes to monitor and track these services. This method is outdated, slow and inaccurate; automation is a must. Enterprises dealing with more sophisticated telecom services increasingly need to automate many of their service tracking and documentation processes. TEM solutions provide the underlying management capabilities needed to keep inventories up to date and invoice/contract management that keeps telecom purchasing efficient and controlled.

TEM solutions offer transparency into a complex and often misaligned aspects of the enterprise communications budget. As the enterprise hustle to explain upgrade or new technology costs to the c-suite, being better informed and having accurate data at your fingertips is critical. With cloud, international growth, IT-telecom convergence and manual processes all affecting telecom roadmaps, the enterprise can use TEM solutions to combat the complexity and ensure accurate data within their telecom strategies.