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A Tangoe lesson to get rid of the telecom and cloud expenses flab

The increasing adoption of BYOD and mobility will keep Telecom Expense Management(TEM) in the CIO's IT priority list

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Soma Tah
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Telecom expense accounts for one of the largest operating expenses for organizations worldwide. It frequently comes under the scanner, as it continues to spiral out of control, owing to poor visibility into the user requirements and the associated billing plans. The situation takes a turn for the worse with the confluence of cloud and mobile, making the organizations think hard on how they can keep the costs under control and save those pennies for other good reasons.

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Paul R. Ybarra, senior vice president of international sales, Tangoe and Mark Evans, the commercial Director of APAC -who were in India recently during CeBIT, explained how.

The requirements for enterprise communications are growing at a rapid pace, further emphasizing the need for a single solution to turn on, track, manage, secure, and support various connections including mobile, cloud and social. Tangoe has solutions that give real time information at every connection point, and deliver actionable insight for enterprises to help them fine-tune their operations, increase efficiency and control costs simultaneously.

CIOL: Could you please tell us why CIOs should consider investing in dedicated Expense Management solutions?

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The increasing adoption of BYOD and mobility will keep Telecom Expense Management(TEM) in the CIO's IT priority list. The benefits are actually two-fold- visibility and cost control. Most of the companies so far are depending on spreadsheets and manual data entry to keep a tab on the telecom expenses. But that does not provide you the required visibility into your communications spends. It does not help you determine the best possible rate structure based on your voice, data and mobility usage and peak service times either. A centralized automated process can help you consolidate all these distributed tasks. Considering your specific requirements, it also helps the CFOs to identify the potential cost-saving options and negotiate contracts with carriers to get favorable rate and service plans.

Paul Ybarra Paul Ybarra, Senior VP- International Sales, Tangoe

CIOL: How relevant is the solution in the Indian context?

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India will soon have the largest number of younger workforce, with more than half of the country's population of 1.25 billion being under 35 years of age already. The increasing number of millennials entering the workforce and their affinity for mobile devices will put additional pressure on the enterprises to manage their communication services spends efficiently.

Not all the telecom service providers here provide electronic invoices, and even if they do, they use a variety of formats making it difficult for the users to manage or review the invoices for billing discrepancies. The high dependency on paper billing among the Indian organizations also increases the complexity of tracking bills and the bill payment process. Outsourcing these tasks to a TEM solutions provider can help organizations do away with these time-consuming manual processes and cut telecom costs by 10 to 30 percent.

CIOL: Unexpected bill shocks can be annoying for organizations operating on a shrinking budget. Do you help organizations confront this problem?

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In the increasingly mobile environment of today, users often exceed their regular plan limits and pay an exorbitant amount on their phone bills. This causes a major blow to the cost-containment efforts by the organizations as well. We have a real-time monitoring solution to help organizations monitor, analyze and report the mobile data, voice, SMS, and roaming consumption costs across a wide array of devices and carrier networks across the world. The real-time visibility help businesses and individuals to control the mobile usage and avoid unexpected bill shocks. The mobile applications can help IT department to track the device usage and send you alerts to avoid excessive costs when traveling internationally.

mark evans Mark Evans, Commercial Director- APAC, Tangoe

CIOL: Do you provide similar solutions for enterprise cloud expense management as well?

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The growing dependency of the easy to use cloud-based apps and the high adoption of it among the separate business units inside the organization have often resulted in poor management and misallocated expenses. We have come up with the MatrixCloud beta program which helps organizations realize the best possible value from their cloud subscriptions. The solution also helps the organizations understand their cloud reality, by allowing complete visibility into the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS utilization patterns and the expenses associated. This also helps organizations to identify unused cloud licenses and other hidden costs.

CIOL: Is there any provision to integrate all these different modules in a single dashboard?

Yes. We provide a holistic view of the organizations' telecom and cloud infrastructure consumption patterns through a single repository of information for all the fixed lines, mobile and cloud usage. This helps CIOs- as they don't really need to go through the time-consuming process of scanning multiple data streams to make the CTOs understand their pain-points and build consensus in solving them. A single dashboard view also helps them to quickly assess the relevant information and identify the potential savings options.

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