Podcast: BI on the TEM Team

July 6, 2009

Listen to Tony Mazzullo Discuss TEM and BI:

The current economic downturn has many companies scrambling to reduce expenses. As a major expense for most companies today, telecommunications has become a target for cost-cutting efforts. Solutions for Telecom Expense Management, or TEM, have proven tonymazzullo highly effective in reducing telecom costs without impacting services or capabilities. TEM solutions that incorporate business intelligence (BI) leverage the power of telecom expense management to provide greater visibility into organizational spending and habits than previously available. They provide strategic and tactical decision support, as well as operational support, generating actionable business intelligence to guide telecom and IT investment decisions.

BI tools that are embedded into TEM solutions are most effective in analyzing usage and controlling spend. According to the Aberdeen Group in a June 2009 Market Alert, “enterprises are more likely to use pre-integrated BI in enterprise applications and these BI capabilities are capable of reducing telecom and other IT expenses …[such solutions] maximize the value of the highly granular and detailed telecom expense information collected through telecom expense management systems.”

BI offers advanced analytics, graphical analysis, and budgeting/planning capabilities. It multiplies the ability of TEM to help organizations improve efficiencies, do more with less, become more agile and flexible, and align operations with the enterprise business strategy. Corporate executives know that BI can help them make the best use of their telecom data and resources, optimize business performance, and gain control over telecom expenses. Integrated TEM/BI solutions deliver these benefits “out of the box,” facilitating rapid deployment and ROI.

As a result, Aberdeen is making a strong recommendation to customers: “develop or acquire a full telecom lifecycle management/TEM solution to manage enterprise telecommunications and network deployment. … [and] choose a solution with a pre-integrated BI solution in place. This pre-integration will allow the organization to achieve the level of adoption … and … improve the organization’s ability to provide automated reporting capabilities to display the summation of thousands of telecom invoices without requiring significant manual processing.”

The tremendous value that TEM is bringing to so many organizations today hints at the much greater savings that can be obtained from solutions aimed at IT expense management, or iTEM. In most organizations, IT expenses – and potential savings – are three times greater than those experienced with telecom. As TEM evolves to iTEM, and more organizations – large and small – harness the power of iTEM and enhance that power with business intelligence and workflow solutions, dollars will flow from operational spend to capital investment. There’s no doubt that BI will also be a key component of the leading iTEM solutions, delivering business intelligence to support expense management decisions across the entire IT landscape.

–Tony Mazzullo, CEO, Veramark

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Business Intelligence