Blog

By Larry Foster

The 2017 AOTMP Fixed and Mobile Telecom Management Conference just concluded in Orlando. It was energizing to be part of the annual conference that brought together leading enterprises and vendors. Here’s an overview of the key themes I noticed from the show:

Analytics

More this year than last, analytics is top of mind for both enterprises and vendors. There have been big leaps in innovation across the industry with some of the largest global enterprises moving forward to add new business value as a result of the newfound insights.

What is Telecom? It is becoming a harder question to answer:

Telecom used to be just fixed line, then we added mobility. Now, our industry has seen the addition of a broad range of new cloud and on premise-based services in the unified communications space. Enterprise attendees are all facing the challenge of managing these new services. Many are wondering if they can manage them with traditional approaches, or will it be necessary to make more changes to adapt to the new world of telecom.

Consumption-based Economy

There is a clear transition to a consumption-based model for using telecom services. This approach shifts the TEM value focus from managing invoice-based expenses in arrears to monitoring and managing expenses as they are consumed in near-real-time to prevent costly invoices.

Overall

The days finding the “big rocks” of incorrectly billed expenses to substantiate the value of the TEM program are gone for most enterprises. Invoice errors are now statically less than 3%-to-5%. Organizations are shifting beyond traditional telecom audits, and upping the sophistication of managing their full communication lifecycle processes. Ultimately the new goal is to provide business value by proactively avoiding charges across a multitude of “new” telecom and cloud expense service types, while reducing the hard-to-find waste that has traditionally been hidden without access to the proper analytics and  reporting solutions.