For businesses, the importance of telecom expense management grows as they adopt more cloud solutions and they implement sprawling Internet of Things (IoT) and mobility strategies. While expenses analyzed previously included voice and data, the scope of management has expanded exponentially with nearly every area of business occurring over IT connections.

Gartner recently conducted a survey to gain a better understanding of telecom expense management and how it is changing alongside broader shifts in technology adoption. Several key trends emerged from the findings:

Third-Party Solutions: Enterprises are generally choosing solutions from managed services providers that offer cloud-based telecom expense management. This trend is largely dictated by digital transformation strategies that are putting more pressure on enterprise resources in an effort to control budgets related to communications and cloud-based applications. While many organizations are managing both IT and telecom in-house, the increasing level of complexity requires tools for managing costs.

Single, Integrated Solutions: There is initial interest in accessing a telecom expense management solution that provides a way to track varied costs, services, and inventories around a number of technologies, including IoT, software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), unified communications as a service (UCaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). This type of solution allows the enterprise to provide streamlined reporting on usage and costs as well as manage licenses, service level agreements, and procurement.

Better Analytics: Telecom expense management is being used to produce advanced data analytics, better equipping decision-makers in areas such as cost predictability and improving the user experience. Analytics can be used for strategic and tactical business decisions related to communications and other IT investments in terms of contract negotiations, budgets, and inventory.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Providers for telecom expense management are optimizing the performance of these solutions for complex environments with RPA. New tools include automated invoices, provider integration, data processing and workflow links for situations in which standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) aren’t available and a manual alternative is not an effective option.

Enterprises choosing highly automated platforms that utilize RPA should make sure there are assurance metrics available and that correction processes are in place.

The area of telecom expense management is expected to grow as enterprises increase their investments in digital transformation and a higher percentage of their budget is funneled through telecom-dependent solutions.

For more information about how telecom expense management is changing or for guidance in choosing a solution for your business, contact us at Diversified Technology Group. We look forward to assisting you in the pursuit of better expense management.