Is time right for Telecom Expense Management and SaaS?

Posted by Bram Cool

Many organizations are in the midst of their annual budgeting and planning cycles for 2009, cost reduction programs have become the key priority in order the weather the current economic crisis. Telecom is a top 3 expense category with MNC’s spending 1.500 – 4.000 $ per employee per year.

Leading analysts like Gartner (see link below) and Forrester advise enterprises to start adopting Telecom Expense Management (TEM). According to Jeffrey Kaplan it is also a good time to adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).  In his article “Time is right to consider SaaS and Cloud Computing” he elaborates on the main advantages of SaaS for enterprises; like the speed of implementation and the pay-as-you-go basis of the products.

I believe that the time is indeed right for SaaS services and Telecom Expense Management is one of these services that is well suited to be offered in a SaaS model. It allows enterprises to start managing telecommunications expenses in a matter of weeks and allows for well-founded decisions on how costs can be decreased in a structural way that have a positive impact on their organizations.
My quick and dirty business case for TEM in a SaaS model:

  • Savings: >20%
  • CapEx: 0 $
  • Implementation: weeks
  • Savings / Cost Ratio: 7/1
  • All the benefits of a managed service…

More info:

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 10:52 am and is filed under News, Telecom Expense Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Is time right for Telecom Expense Management and SaaS?”

  1. Adrian McClenaghan says on December 1st, 2008 at 2:30 pm :

    Hi,

    I read your article with interest. We as a company are already providing assistance to TEM providers in Europe and the US, and we provide it all on a Managed Service SaaS model. We have certainly seen a huge growth in the service in the past 2 years as more and more Enterprise businesses realise that a cost per head is a better model than large CAPEX expenditure.

    I would be interested to know what you opinion is on our offering, and whether you think there may be any mileage in having a discussion about how we can assist your clients to reduce their expenditure, even look at capacity planning across an IP network.

    Charging model is based on a $0.00XX per CDR record collected, meaning it is an easy cost to swallow as a service charge. Multiple carrier tariffs can be compared and multiple charging routes and paths created, even charging back calls based on account codes/cost centres, for Lawyers or similar.

    Check me out on LinkedIn and I will happily answer any questions or send you further information if you think it would be a fruitful conversation.

    Kind Regards

    Adrian McClenaghan

    PS. We have an office in NJ for our US operations.

  2. Visicom says on February 16th, 2009 at 5:02 pm :

    Not to mention that when you have a guarantee of cost savings, a deadline of when savings will be realized, and a provider working off contingency – you can see real hard dollar and operational savings almost immediately.

    Bridget Thomas
    Visicom
    Madison, WI

  3. Paul Aaron says on July 13th, 2009 at 6:08 pm :

    Hello
    I enjoyed your article and feel that the TEM industry will change in this direction in a very big way. In your benefits of an SaaS solution you mentioned that it had all the benefits of a managed service. In the comment below, the gentleman mentioned that they have a Managed SaaS model. Can you explain how SaaS differs from Managed Solutions?

    Thank you

  4. ANDY says on November 6th, 2009 at 12:06 am :

    Great Idea…Qudex launched a subscription based SaaS for Telecom Expense Magt that is tied into US carriers. It also has a complete Agent tool that includes commission management. The Agent management piece is multi-tiered for several agents within the same commission line. Qudex.com

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