Amtel's TIMS Platform Separates Mobile App Download Charges in Corporate Telecom Billing
July 13, 2010
By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor
With increasing popularity of smartphones among enterprise customers, telecom costs of the enterprises are on the rise - thanks to the paid apps and value added services offered by carriers to smartphone customers.
To help organizations manage their telecom billing in an efficient way, Amtel, a provider of cell phone expense management software platform, announced a new mobile expense platform that segregates mobile smart phone applications charges in corporate telecom billing.
Amtel's (News - Alert) award-winning Telecom Information Management System or "TIMS" platform is designed to provide an easy to manage application for tracking mobile phone expenses at an organization. The solution can be configured to segregate personal employee usage charges from the acceptable corporate spend. With this, companies can automatically send the charges-split report for non-approved download charges to the end users and the corporate accounting.
According to Amtel officials, for many corporate clients, more than 7 percent of monthly mobile spend is attributed to mobile apps downloads, ring tones, 411 directory assistance and picture messaging. This percentage is increasing with smart phone adoption among enterprises.
Apple iPhone, RIM Blackberry and Motorola (News - Alert) Droid are the most popular smartphones that eat up a significant share of telecom costs of enterprises. They offer a variety of paid applications that can be downloaded from carrier's online store by end users. The cost of these apps ranges from $0.99 to $9.99 per download.
According to a recent comScore (News - Alert) report, during the last three months ending in May, 49.1 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, an increase of 8.1 percent from the corresponding February period, TMCnet reported.
"With the popularity of Mobile apps it is putting an extra burden on the corporate mobile billing. Companies are struggling to find ways to implement mobile policy & segregate the individual apps spend from the allowable corporate usage policy," Pankaj Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Amtel, said.
Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Erin Harrison