Blog

Written by: Larry Foster, Head of Product Strategy 

Last week saw some of the most powerful influencers and thought leaders in the Telecom Expense Management (TEM) and Managed Mobility Services (MMS) world come together at the tenth Annual TEMIA Conference.  As one of the founding board members of TEMIA, I always look forward to this “meeting of the minds,” so to speak. When we first started TEMIA, the organization was simply trying to wrap its head around the concept of expense management best practices for just wireline telephony.  This past week’s conversations are a subtle reminder of just how far TEM vendors, practitioners and end users have pushed this industry.

For those of you not familiar with TEMIA’s Annual Conference, the meeting is designed to facilitate discussion around future trends and best practices within the expanding telecom expense management landscape. As you can imagine, bringing together TEM/MMS solution providers and telecom carriers, who for all intents and purposes are fierce competitors, every other day of the year, is no easy task. But all involved lay down the gloves for this two day event, combining their experience as well as what they’re seeing in the market, to help steer the whole industry towards creating higher value for end users in the market.

Today, I thought I’d do a quick round up of the topics that we spent the bulk of the two days working through.  The goal being to share what we’re all seeing as emerging trends:

The top three items discussed at this year’s Annual TEMIA Conference were:

 – The resurgence of corporate-supported mobile devices

• While BYOD was all the hype in past years, the group is seeing evidence to suggest that the optimism around operational savings has been dimmed by the reality of security issues, corporate app deployment and the greater burdens of supporting corporate connectivity across a broader range of devices.
• As a result, there is a current trend to bring BYOD back in-house, allowing stronger control and visibility across the enterprise, which is what this group sees as the real cost saving potential.

– How Unified Communications (UC) is changing the TEM landscape

• Cloud & hybrid UC deployments are creating the need to focus expense management on consumption versus managing legacy T1 and POTs circuits. In fact, the room spent a considerable amount of time discussing the parallels of the UC market to the Mobile services market. With many of the same challenges between the two, it’s clear that enterprises are interested in managing UC like mobility, in the sense that they are wanting to track features, zero usage, and understand efficient and effective ways to repurpose licenses.

– The proliferation of cloud services

• It’s no surprise that enterprises are challenged when it comes to wrangling cloud costs. With the Line of Business having increased buying power over IT, it’s creating shadow IT departments in almost every major organization.  This is causing issues when organizations are attempting to get to the appropriate billing details at an aggregate level. By example, cloud services bills are often summary level and the details are not associated to an owner.  Many in the room would agree that moving into managing cloud expense is a clear and natural evolution for those vendors and enterprises still focused on legacy telecom expense management.

In addition to the items that we did discuss, what might be equally as important is what we didn’t discuss. You’ll notice that we didn’t talk about how to support fixed line telecom devices, or how to more rapidly load invoice data, or how to analyze spend and reduce higher percentages of fixed line costs. These are historical problems for which TEMIA members have developed and implemented effective management strategies.

With the impending landscape changes related to the FCC 2020 rule becoming more apparent every year, this meeting was focused on expanding outside of the traditional fixed line. The FCC 2020 rule has mandated that legacy TDM services like T1, PRIs and POTs services will need to be migrated to the new digital technology platform by 2020. That’s just four short years from this meeting.

As such, TEMIA members discussed emerging coverage areas like unified communications, cloud services and how our customers are asking for ways to double down on corporate owned mobile device management.  All of which is very telling in terms of where the industry is heading and what kinds of challenges end users are looking to solve.

Do you have a point of view?  Want to share what you’re seeing?  TEMIA is currently running a survey which will be turned into a marketing industry report.  Click here to participate.