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Expenditures on telecommunications services often take huge bites out of enterprise budgets—and not necessarily because the services themselves are expensive. Rather, because billing errors and poor or nonexistent telecom asset management result in significant losses.
The solution to this problem is a telecom expense management (TEM) solution from one of the leading companies in the field. This month, 23 such companies teamed up to form the Telecom Expense Management Industry Association (TEMIA), with the goal of promoting TEM.
TEMIA’s charter members represent the crème de la crème of the TEM industry, as ranked by Gartner’s ( News - Alert) MarketScope. Together, these companies are helping to control an excess of $20 billion in domestic and international telecom expenses—including those associated with voice, data, and wireless services.
“Our goal as an association is to encompass TEM-related companies of all sizes, the carriers with whom we work, and a wide variety of vendors in our industry,” the organization’s chairman and president, David Spofford, said in a statement. “Our initial membership includes small and large entities specializing in all delivery models.”
Board member and membership committee chair David Perdue added: “The rapid emergence of an industry like TEM often necessitates a strong educational effort to promote its wide-ranging benefits. We will seek to put forward this information to all interested parties.”
Founding members of TEMIA are listed below.
Gartner’s vice president of research, Eric Goodness, said that TEMIA’s formation comes at exactly the right time to effectively promote the benefits of TEM.
“It is essential that an association such as TEMIA exists so that communications and cooperation are facilitated between market players to advance TEM solutions adoption,” Goodness said in a statement. “Gartner views TEMIA as a valuable resource to educate customers, outsourcers and carriers about the best practices to best manage network and telecom related assets and expenses.”
TEMIA’s formation comes at a time when the future of TEM looks very bright indeed. Recent estimates from Gartner show that revenue generated from TEM software and IT services will exceeded $400 million in 2006. Gartner also predicts that the market will grow at a compound annual rate of nearly 40 percent between 2006 and 2010, when it will reach $1.5 billion.
The new organization has scheduled its first member meeting for March 8-9, in Orlando, Florida.
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