On the plane to Vegas…
I was on a US Airways flight and saw a great ad for GotVmail.com. One of the things that I liked about the product is that it also included call accounting in its list of features while aggregating a bunch of services that would normally be a pain to acquire on an individual basis. Any business phone service that can provide Virtual PBX with extensions, voicemail and fax distribution, and itemized call detail is definitely providing some useful options for individual telecom expense management. If only there were companies that could provide all this on a corporate level... Sure, we have unified communications, call accounting, telecom expense management, and all sorts of other technical solutions for sorting our communications, but it's still not all available as one consolidated bundle. Yet.
So, how do you install a Telecom Expense Management solution?
I've been involved in telecom expense solutions as a vendor and as an end user and every single time, I've run into the same mindset. Every time I've seen a company do this so far, they start by looking at vendor solutions and getting some analyst's opinion of how much money could be saved. And I can assure you that neither of these is the right way to go.
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.
IBM goes Global (with TEM)
Wait, doesn't IBM always have a global product for every possible technology in existence? Until February 20th, the answer was "apparently not." IBM announced last week that it is launching a global Telecom Expense Management solution complete with 6-8 weeks of consulting and followed up with a fully outsourced suite of services. The solution is going to be powered by Rivermine, which IBM started working with last year.
