The Fragmentation of Telecom Expense Management
One of the biggest challenges of covering the Telecom Expense Management space is that there is such a high level of fragmentation and vagueness of categorization in the marketplace. In looking at a "Telecom Lifecycle Management" solution, the typical end user has no clue whether this refers to ordering a phone number, handling a cell phone, handling the procurement of a switch, or even handling access points for a wireless network that handles voice calls.Vendors try to differentiate by simply adding more and more services, but often just add confusion. So that I'm clear in the future in writing this blog, I'm going to suggest a few definitions that I'm going to use to maintain internal consistency.
The joys of following cell phone rate trends!
In the past two weeks, all of the major carriers decided on some form of the all-you-can-eat plan, which commoditizes cellular usage to some extent. This decision goes one step further in the wireless sector's inevitable march to being another set of dumb pipes just like cable and landline telecom. The cable providers will fight this, since it's hard to make money when you can't justify value-added services. But at the same time, it's really hard to be both an infrastructure provider and a content provider at the same time. (This is why great content creators like Electronic Arts aren't in charge of the Internets.) So, how good are each of the plans that came out this week? Let's take a look at each one.
Never Fail, My Blackberry!
This isn't really a TEM entry per se, but why am I being so melodramatic? As you may know, RIM had a serious outage earlier this month. In response, Vodafone took the wise step of hiring Neverfail to insure availability when the Blackberry network has further problems. This is great, except that I thought the Blackberry outage was because of a system failure at the single point of failure at Waterloo. I'm not sure how Neverfail can get away from routing emails through Waterloo.
