New Report Examines Business Value of Telecom Expense Management
January 12, 2015
By Rory J. Thompson, Web Editor
In the expanding world of high technology, it’s getting more and more complicated for chief financial officers to keep a close eye on the bottom line. New expenses that didn’t even exist a generation ago are now gobbling up huge pieces of the budget, to the detriment of the company and everyone who works there.
Yet there is one area that is consistently overlooked but can still play a strong role in keeping spending manageable: Telecom Expenses.
If you stop and add up how much your company actually spends annually on this nascent area, you’ll see that it is probably way more than imagined.
And that’s the thrust behind a new report from a company called Telecommunications Market Research, which looks at this very issue: how much are companies spending, and where? The company spells out the reason for its report from the start: “Telecom expense management is a solution whereby business organizations can effectively manage their telecom networks,” the report’s intro states. “Such a solution encompasses people, technologies and processes that are needed to govern the network. With the help of telecom expense management, it is possible to maintain an accurate inventory of all the network elements in an organization including server, wiring panels, laptops, cell phones and others.”
Further, the research breaks down the segment into “bite-sized” pieces, helping make a daunting task a little more manageable.
“Telecom expense management is segmented on the basis of solutions into usage management, sourcing management, reporting and business management, ordering and provisioning management, invoice and contract management, inventory management and dispute management, among others,” the report explains. “On the basis of service delivery modes, telecom expense management is segmented into complete outsourcing delivery mode, managed services delivery mode, licensed software and hosted services.”
In short, if taken and examined as separate segments, savvy business managers can see where their costs lie within telecom expenses, and address them accordingly. For example, “The increasing adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is one of the major factors fueling the growth of [the] telecom expense management market,” the research found. “Employees today are taking the advantage of mobile phones and other portable devices in keeping themselves connected with the corporate network.”
The report concludes that “Telecom expense management solutions cost-effectively addresses changes in BYOD inventory such as monitoring individual device costs and their usage plans. It also helps in controlling application policies to avoid any illegal applications that affect the data security thereby contributing to the growth of the market.”
Need help with your bottom line? Take a closer look at what people are holding in their hands.
Edited by Maurice Nagle