Telecom expense management used to be a niche business about which players had to educate the market place. But today TEM is well understood – so well understood, in fact, that some of the world’s most important telephone companies have pulled telecom expense management solutions into their portfolios. Vodafone (News - Alert) is one such example.

A year ago this October, Vodafone brought Quickcomm into the fold.

Quickcomm CEO Mark Evans says the TEM company was founded in 1997 in Sydney. Initially, its customer base consisted primarily of the Australian branches of multinational corporations. Back then, Evans explains, Quickcomm gave companies software to run themselves, but today it relies on a software-as-a-service model.

In the early 2000s, Quickcomm moved its headquarters to New York City and began to take on larger customers, including Computer Sciences (News - Alert), which signed on as its first big customer in the states. Evans says Quickcomm’s background put it ahead of the TEM pack in the U.S. given its global outlook, which he says enabled the company to win a considerable amount of global accounts based on that strength.

Noting that there is an appetite in the U.S. for TEM as a managed service, Evans says Quickcomm after its move here partnered with BT (News - Alert) North America and then Verizon to wrap people around the TEM software and offer it as a managed service. Verizon Business, he says, approached Quickcomm in the 2008-9 timeframe and wanted to build a TEM practice with a focus on managed mobility. Of course, he adds, Verizon Wireless (News - Alert) is 45 percent owned by Vodafone, so Quickcomm was introduced to Vodafone in the process.

Vodafone is global, he adds, but its strength is in Europe. So Quickcomm formed a similar relationship with Vodafone Global Enterprise that it did with Verizon. Then, in October 2010, Vodafone acquired Quickcomm. Vodafone Global Enterprise had 600 named customers prior to the merger, Evans says, and Quickcomm has the potential to bring 20,000 customers to the table within the target market.

Most of the global carriers, including Orange, Telefonica and Telstra (News - Alert), now are developing TEM offerings, adds Evans, so Quickcomm is about two years ahead of the pack. Vodafone and Quickcomm have done tons of integration and make their offering really advanced, he adds. And Evans predicts that in two years all of the independent TEM outfits will be owned by bigger operations.

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