Telecom Expense Management is so blase.  Telecom Lifecycle Management is fresh.  When you examine it closely, it is difficult to tell the difference between the two.  Which one is right for you?  The answer may not be as simple as you think.

Usually, TEMs are viewed as providing a very short term engagement, where they reduce costs quickly.  TLMs are expected to provide a holistic view which might begin at expense management but would also look at order fulfillment, asset management, managing SLAs, and on and on.  But is it unrealistic to expect long-term savings from short-term engagements?  No.  Any TEM/TLM should be able to provide recommendations for extended savings.  The biggest obstacle to maintaining and increasing savings is your organization.  Loss of efficiency usually takes place when there is no communications between people negotiating contracts and people ordering services, and when there are no quality management processes in place to monitor activity (MACD, Contract maturity, organizational changes).

TLM is something that you should be getting from any vendor, but it is only achievable with buy-in from your organization.  Monitoring processes from cradle-to-grave is the only way to achieve long-term savings.

If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, Bob posted an article in the resources section on “beating up on the vendor’  found here.  As you might expect, a lot of Telecom Expense Management companies have weighed in on this subject.  I’ve heard several TEM vendors tell of their expertise in this area.  Bob makes some good points on how this can be counterproductive if you do not use this strategy wisely. Read more…

When Private Equity group Silver Lake purchased a large portion of Skype Technologies earlier this week, a ripple went through the technology community.  Could this be a sign of further cash infusions into the technology sector which has been struggling, as a whole, since the dotcom bubble burst almost 10 years ago.? It is said that necessity is the mother of invention, but it is capital that makes that innovation a finished, enterprise class product.  During what I like to call “The Golden Age” of IT, just before Y2K, there seemed to be no end to the ideas that were being developed.  Some of these ideas were good and some were bad – real bad. Read more…