Prioritizing the employee experience is key in maintaining an effective and efficient mobility strategy. Without standardized policies with flexibility to enable the end-user, employees can struggle with the inefficiencies which can negatively affect productivity and retention.
Listen in as we talk with Nicola Whiting on how organizations should view the end-user experience and the importance of prioritizing it.
UCaaS apps such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and RingCentral have become commonplace across the business environment. UCaaS has become business critical services and is now a major factor to SaaS application growth and waste.
By 2026:
• SaaS spend will grow by 187% to $317B*
• UCaaS will consume up to 15% of SaaS spend
• UCaaS waste will average between 30-50%, resulting in $24B in potential waste annually
• SaaS waste will average 30%, resulting in $81B in potential waste annually
*With the Gartner Public Cloud Service Forecast prediction of 40% (MM: Where did we get this number from? See below for the source data) growth of overall SaaS (including UCaaS) applications in enterprises by 2026, sprawl is here and is becoming a major challenge for organizations.
As a technology stakeholder, you may have heard of the term “Channel Partner” and wondered how it fits into the overall strategy of Technology Expense Management (TEM). According to Gartner, “A channel partner is a company — such as a reseller, service provider, vendor, retailer or agent — that partners with another organization to market or sell their services, products or technologies.”
INDIANAPOLIS, IN August 3, 2022 – Calero-MDSL, the leading provider of technology expense management, has been named the Hottest New Telecom Solution, as part of the AOTMP® Vendor Awards. These awards recognize vendors and individuals that provide innovation and excellence across industry products, services, and solutions.
The Hottest New Telecom Solution recognizes the most progressive new telecom product, service, or solution introduced by a vendor, supplier, or service provider in the past year.
This award was given to Calero-MDSL in recognition of TrueInsight. TrueInsight connects directly to telecom service providers and automatically retrieves and normalizes the latest inventory data. Within hours, TrueInsight builds a complete network visualization of inventory including all items, types, and locations where telecom services reside, allowing customers to quickly surface anomalies and help them easily identify areas needing technology transformation and optimization. TrueInsight was introduced by Calero-MDSL in 2021.
Timothy C. Colwell, AOTMP® Executive Vice President, said, “The accomplishments of this year’s AOTMP® Vendor Award winners, both company and individual, demonstrate undeniable business results and compelling value propositions across the board. These outstanding individuals, vendors, suppliers, and service providers are making an impact in the telecom, mobility, and IT management industry.”
About Calero-MDSL
Calero-MDSL is the leading Technology Expense Management provider, managing over $25 billion in spend worldwide for thousands of organizations in 102 countries. With a deep commitment to innovation and customer success, Calero-MDSL partners with organizations to provide a modernized, centralized technology expense management solution that supports Telecom Expense Management, Managed Mobility Services, and SaaS Subscription Management. Calero-MDSL is the industry leader in initiatives that solve pervasive market problems and continues to be recognized by industry analysts for award-winning achievements. The company is committed to serving customers with innovative solutions that provide visibility, control, and optimization of their entire technology ecosystem.
About AOTMP
AOTMP® is a global organization, empowering professionals in the dynamic $4+ trillion telecom, mobility and IT management industry. AOTMP® delivers value through training, certifications, association memberships, events & programs, best practices, publications, resources, and professional development.
Learn more at www.aotmp.com
Is it paradoxical to be innovative when it comes to budgeting? Budgeting isn’t typically considered to be revolutionary or extraordinary, but as a necessary core function of every business, it is important to remain agile when unexpected market changes occur. Join us as we talk with Scott Howard (VP, Program Consulting) about ways that you can take an innovative look at your company budgets.
Rochester, NY (August 2, 2022) — Calero-MDSL, a leader in the high-growth Technology Expense Management (TEM) software space, announced today that it has acquired Network Control, a boutique Telecom Expense Management company providing high-touch telecom expense management and managed mobility software and services to customers for the past 22 years. Calero-MDSL is a portfolio company of Riverside Partners and Oak Hill Capital Partners. Financial terms were not disclosed.
As part of the transaction, Mark Hearn, owner and CEO of Network Control, will join the Calero-MDSL team as Vice President and General Manager of its Network Control Business Unit. In this role, Hearn will be responsible for ensuring that his customers continue to receive the high-quality services and attention to which they have become accustomed. The Network Control team and operations will continue to be headquartered in Waverly, Iowa.
"We are very excited to be acquiring Network Control and look forward to Mark and the Network Control employees joining the Calero-MDSL team,” said Scott Gilbert, CEO of Calero-MDSL. “Combined with the investments in our technology and platform, this acquisition provides Calero-MDSL with the perfect springboard from which to accelerate our growth in the middle-market, one of our 2022 strategic initiatives,” continued Gilbert.
Hearn added, “As I evaluated the many options available to me, my focus was on finding a partner that would allow me to continue to provide outstanding service to my customers, take care of my wonderful employees, and accelerate the growth trajectory I have spent 11 years building. I am convinced that Calero-MDSL is the only firm capable of checking all three of these boxes and I am delighted to continue this journey with Scott and the Calero-MDSL team.”
Steven Kaplan, Chairman of the Board of Calero-MDSL and a General Partner at Riverside Partners, and Adam Hahn, a Principal at Oak Hill Capital Partners, added “We are excited to fold Network Control in to the Calero-MDSL family. Not only do the two companies share similar views on customer service and technology, but we especially appreciate the culture and values shared by the two firms’ leadership teams”.
About Calero-MDSL
Calero-MDSL is the leading Technology Expense Management provider, managing over $25 billion in spend worldwide for thousands of organizations in 102 countries. With a deep commitment to innovation and customer success, Calero-MDSL partners with organizations to provide a modernized, centralized technology expense management solution that supports Telecom Expense Management, Managed Mobility Services, and SaaS Subscription Management. Calero-MDSL is the industry leader in initiatives that solve pervasive market problems and continues to be recognized by industry analysts for award-winning achievements. The company is committed to serving customers with innovative solutions that provide visibility, control, and optimization of their entire technology ecosystem. To learn more, visit www.caleromdsl.com.
About Riverside Partners
Founded in 1989, Riverside Partners is a middle market private equity firm currently investing out of its sixth fund. The firm focuses on growth-oriented companies in the technology and healthcare industries. Riverside Partners is particularly experienced at partnering with founders, owners and management teams and it brings substantial domain expertise and operating experience to its portfolio companies. Today, Riverside Partners manages about $1.1 billion of equity capital and seeks to make investments in companies with EBITDA between $3 and $15 million. For more information, please visit www.riversidepartners.com.
About Oak Hill Capital
Oak Hill is a longstanding private equity firm focused on the North America middle-market. Oak Hill applies a specialized, theme-based approach to investing in the following dedicated industry sectors: Media & Communications, Industrials, Services, and Consumer. The Firm implements a highly systematic approach to theme development, proactive origination, and value creation in partnership with management to build franchises of lasting value. Since 1986, Oak Hill and its predecessors have raised approximately $20 billion of initial capital commitments and co-investments, invested in approximately 100 companies, and completed more than 300 add-on acquisitions representing an aggregate enterprise value at acquisition of over $60 billion. For more information, please visit www.oakhill.com.
For businesses accustomed to traditional service level agreements (SLAs), the emergence of experience level agreements (XLAs) represents a valuable new perspective to help increase end- user satisfaction and boost productivity. Putting an XLA into place is just the first step—you also need the right mobility strategy and tools designed around the user experience to make the most of this innovative approach.
If you’ve looked at a calendar lately, you may have noticed we’re already halfway through the year. That means it's already time to start thinking about budgets and expense management plan for 2023. With steep rises in inflation this year, you’ve likely seen impacts to your technology costs and services. One way to fight these costs is to stay on top of your spending and explore technology expense management (TEM) to optimize costs and manage your budget.
Calero-MDSL is honored to sponsor the upcoming 2022 AOTMP Industry Solutions Showcase, taking place virtually on July 27th and 28th.
Now more than ever, users are able to navigate and control SaaS applications. In this Dare to Innovate podcast episode, we discuss the ease of SaaS licensing and pain points for IT departments. Join Calero-MDSL CTO Simon Mendoza, CEO Scott Gilbert, and President and CRO Andrew Taylor as they dive into the risks and rewards of shadow IT.
SaaS applications are everywhere in today’s business environments. Their proliferation has helped to change the way we work, providing colleagues and customers with more powerful collaboration tools and new methods of accessing and processing information.
The wide deployment of SaaS and UCaaS solutions has also added complexity to the way enterprises manage those apps and control the costs associated with licensing, connecting and consuming them. SaaS management traditionally covers the portfolio of applications, including: purchasing, onboarding and offboarding, and license renewals. SaaS expense management takes the concept a step further by highlighting areas for optimization.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 8, 2022) - Calero-MDSL, the leading provider of technology expense management solutions, Application Compliance Manager has been named the best financial and market data solution of 2022 as part of the annual SIIA CODiE Awards. The CODiE Awards recognize the companies producing the most innovative business technology products across the country, and around the world.
The European telecom market is highly fragmented - even the smallest countries host as many as four mobile operators simultaneously. As operators compete for territory, cut-throat price wars saddle many with debt, limiting their ability to upgrade their networks.
As a result, calls for consolidation have grown louder. Larger players, such as Vodafone (UK), Telenor (Norway) and Telefonica (Spain), have urged policymakers to allow European mobile operators to merge and invest more in networks to keep pace with peers in Asia and the US.
Until such consolidations are made, enterprises will need to grapple with various carriers, contracts, and levels of coverage. Doing so successfully is only possible when employees have the tools they need to stay connected, supported and productive at all times. Managed Mobility Services (MMS) provides centralised technology to maximise productivity throughout the company.
Technology is always evolving, and older technologies regularly disappear to make way for newer iterations. One such example affects phones with 3G, a wireless standard that first became available commercially in the US about 20 years ago. Now, as newer technologies gain ground, major carriers plan to phase out their 3G services by the end of 2022.
As companies head into the third year of the pandemic, it is clear that work from home and hybrid work models are here to stay. With a more flexible workforce comes device and application management. It also comes with security and vulnerability challenges, with the evolution of technology and malware, ransomware and other targeted attacks at an all-time high.
How can organizations accurately manage devices and security? One way is through implementing a Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) program, which can tie multiple functions into one streamlined solution.
Introducing the Dare to Innovate podcast, where we discuss and debate technology industry topics, trends, and innovations that are making an impact on the business community. Join Scott Gilbert (CEO) and Andrew Taylor (President, CRO) of Calero-MDSL for our first episode as they explore the explosion of SaaS.
The telecom market is anything but standardised. Multinational businesses operating across Europe, the Middle East and Africa need to deal with various operators across various countries.
The fragmentation goes beyond country borders. Bill quality and formats, language barriers and currency differences feed into the fragmented nature of the telecom market.
As a result, businesses often struggle to understand their overall telecom spend, driving up unnecessary costs. A robust global technology expense management (TEM) solution can help international companies analyse and manage expense data efficiently by offering full inventory transparency.
Let's look at the fragmented nature of telecoms in EMEA and the complicated spend management associated, to explore and explain the full utility of TEM software.
Thanks to the work-from-home movement, more employees, customers and business partners are now accustomed to leveraging UCaaS tools as part of their normal workflows. However, where a quick setup was the priority in the early days of COVID-19, businesses today are savvier about what they want out of a digital collaboration solution. Organizations are increasingly looking for ways to optimize their consumption and improve their UCaaS expense management.
Whether you’re planning to sign up with a new UCaaS provider or preparing to negotiate a renewal with an existing service, we’ve put together 7 things you need to know to as you evaluate UCaaS solutions.
With rising technology costs, supply chain issues, and global security threats, enterprises must evaluate their business continuity plans to prevent disruptions in business and stay on top of innovation so they are not left behind in the technology dust. If a network goes down unexpectedly, or there’s a cyber-attack, companies are exposed to enormous risk that can affect their reputation and bottom line.
Calero-MDSL, the leader in the Technology Expense Management (TEM) industry, announced it is transforming expense management yet again with the launch of the first ever SaaS Expense Management solution.
Rochester, NY (April 26, 2022) – On Monday, Calero-MDSL announced the launch of their new SaaS Expense Management solution at the AOTMP (Association of Telecom Management Professionals) Engage conference. Having launched the celebrated UCaaS solution in 2021, this newest product from Calero-MDSL expands the breadth and depth of the solution into the greater SaaS space. This enables the modernization, centralization, and optimization of an enterprise’s expense management across their overall SaaS portfolio and is further evidence that Calero-MDSL continues to invest in the forward-looking needs of IT expense and lifecycle management across wireline, mobility, and now full SaaS.
The Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) global market size is expected to reach USD 210 billion by 2028, with an annual growth rate of 23.6% from 2021 to 2028, according to Grand View Research, Inc. Given businesses growing reliance on cloud-based tools in recent years, it’s not surprising that the market is expanding at such an astonishing rate.
However, cloud-based tools, such as UCaaS is a relatively new concept for many businesses when it comes to specifics (i.e. call accounting, license management). Even seasoned IT, Operations, and Finance experts have difficulty wrapping their heads around the various terms in the wider cloud-based toolset, which the unified communications sphere forms a part of.
In this guide, we’ll go back to basics and reveal the meaning behind ten cloud and UCaaS-related acronyms. Continue reading to gain the foundational knowledge you need to navigate the industry with confidence.
The financial services landscape is still transitioning - along with the rest of the business world - into post-pandemic mode. Work arrangements are moving from what has been a fully remote workforce for most organizations to either work from home (WFH), full-time office or hybrid. Employee roles are also shifting as enterprises explore ways to reduce manual tasks, free up workers’ time for higher-value activities and nurture productivity.
To help understand how those changes will impact market data management in the coming year, we’ve put together a summary of the trends, updates and key items to consider in 2022.
Technology Expense Management (TEM) stakeholders have their plates full when it comes to managing spend, from handling invoices, to tracking thousands of technology devices, and dealing with billing discrepancies. There aren’t enough hours in the day to handle every single detail. In turn, billing errors and cost savings opportunities can fall through the cracks.
We’ve all seen the explosion of UCaaS, both in the enterprise and in our personal lives. Zoom and Teams meetings became the norm to communicate and collaborate at work and at home, and expertspredicta compound growth rate of 13.4% between 2021 and 2028 for UCaaS services.
The business environment has undergone numerous recent transformations, including the decoupling of person-to-person communication from traditional telephony platforms. Permanent changes in the nature of enterprise collaboration have also come about, driven by the pandemic-inspired move toward a hybrid workforce. Users are more often using their mobiles rather than desk phones, for example, and reliance on direct peer-to-peer communications has also increased.
In this new landscape, cloud-based collaboration tools are now prolific, but they create new challenges for enterprises. Many of these digital channels were launched quickly, without the typical processes in place to manage costs and oversee sprawl. And now that the durability of solutions such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom is becoming clear, companies face a steep learning curve as they work to control spend across these new platforms.
The current rapid adoption of digital transformation and work-from-anywhere environments have combined to make the use of SaaS applications to connect employees, contractors, vendors and other associates and partners rise on a similarly swift pace across the enterprise space.
Updated August 9, 2022
Cloud-based telephony solutions, like Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) are increasingly viable alternatives to platforms such as VoIP and TDM. The shift to UCaaS is a natural progression for many businesses and follows data’s wide-scale move to the cloud. But there are steps you should take to ensure you not only get the ROI you expect from cloud telephony services, but that you remain in control of your UCaaS spend.
Calero-MDSL, the global leader in technology expense management (TEM), announced today its inclusion in Gartner’s 2021 Market Guide for Telecom Expense Management Services. Calero-MDSL is a Representative TEM Pure-Play Vendor for Global Delivery profiled by Gartner in the report. The vendors reviewed include those most frequently asked about in Gartner end-user inquiries, typically serving the large, regional or MNC enterprise base.
“Calero-MDSL is honored to be recognized again in Gartner’s annual TEM Market Guide. We believe inclusion in this guide validates our leading position in the global TEM market, and our ability to simplify recurring technology expenses for the largest companies across the globe” said Scott Gilbert, Chief Executive Officer of Calero-MDSL. “Over the past 12 months, I have been passionate about driving a new sense of bold innovation across our organization and we are now seeing the industry embrace the change as well.”
Gartner’s TEM coverage focuses on SaaS-based applications and platforms, managed services, and associated professional services. Findings in the 2021 Market Guide include:
In today’s world of remote work, the topic of technology and devices has become more important than ever. Homes have been transformed into offices, making it crucial for team members to have the right equipment to complete their work in a secure and efficient manner.
While using a BYO model remains popular with companies, it’s not the most secure or cost-effective strategy. To gain added security benefits and stay compliant, enterprises should consider moving toward a Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) mobility model.
How will you ensure that you are getting the best possible rate for your organization’s telecom service provider? More importantly, where do you start your search?
When is the last time you made an online purchase or opted for delivery over dine-in at a restaurant? Nowadays, you can get almost anything you want delivered to your door with the click of a button. Not only is online shopping convenient, but it has become a necessity for many in the midst of a global pandemic.
The way of doing business continues to evolve for all global enterprises. The meaning of Technology Expense Management (TEM) and all that it embodies is constantly changing to better manage and optimize growing technology spend. Many enterprises are rapidly adapting to the new ways of working and planning ahead with an innovative outlook on their TEM strategy. But the key to staying ahead, is considering the unexpected information that you might be lacking. As you plan your TEM strategy for 2022, consider these new innovations for a successful TEM approach.
Choosing the right technology vendor for your business can be a complicated process. How do you know if you’re making the right decision when it comes to scalability, value, and your overall investment? An RFP scorecard can help you gather and score the right criteria to present to decision makers, in an efficient and organized way.
Our simple infographic below will walk you through how to create a plan for scoring RFP’s in the selection stage when finding a Technology Expense Management (TEM) provider.
Michael Fameli joined Calero-MDSL in November 2021 as VP/GM, continuing the momentum of enhancing our customer experience.
Michael is an experienced enterprise leader and brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise across both technology and operations leadership. Throughout Michael’s career, he has held senior leadership positions in technology, product, service delivery and client experience.
As technology leaders around the globe wrap up budgets and begin planning for next year, Andrew Taylor, President and Chief Revenue Officer of Calero-MDSL had the opportunity to chat with David Bliss, Chief Product Officer of Calero-MDSL to get a sneak-peak of product launches coming in 2022. In this exclusive interview, you’ll learn all about the exciting developments we have in store for Smart Automation, our SaaS and UCaaS management offerings, and how we plan to improve our customer experience in the year ahead.
With a background in IT, and experience in healthcare and financial industries, Robert (B.J.) Block brings a wealth of experience to lead the evolution of our global security posture at Calero-MDSL – to protect our informational assets and continue to extend our lead as the most secure global partner in the industry.
Are you trying to manage the cost and deployment of rapidly expanding UCaaS tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams or RingCentral? Let us help!
Is your organization looking to make a digital transformation in the upcoming year? In recent years, we have seen a trend where all traffic is moving to the cloud. According to Gartner, “Enterprises need this because their network traffic is doubling in size, roughly every 2.9 years.” With the onset of this trend, more organizations have chosen to move to faster and more secure WAN, like SD-WAN, for an easier transfer of digital assets.
In 2017, the European Union banned roaming charges for people using mobile phones abroad. The new rules meant citizens travelling within the EU were able to call, text and browse the internet at the same price they paid at home.
However, after the UK voted to leave the EU and with the trade agreement not incorporating protection against mobile roaming charges, some of the UK’s largest operators are now reintroducing the fees. Such a change in service could create significant difficulties for international companies with employees travelling abroad for work.
In this article, we will discuss what we know about the situation so far and outline what your business can do to ensure the charges don’t catch you or your communications teams off guard.
Microsoft recently announced the first Office price increase in a decade. If your enterprise uses Office, you probably know the platform has rolled out a lot of new capabilities since the last release. The company has essentially reinvented the Office platform as a cutting-edge SaaS service, setting a rate for innovation that would be difficult for many other providers to match. But while the increase appears justified against rising technology costs and upgraded feature sets, it’s still important to take the right steps to ensure your spend matches your needs and usage.
Are you ready for the Microsoft Office price hike? We’ll show you 5 ways to wrangle your Microsoft UCaaS Spend.
With only one quarter left in the year, it’s the ideal time to check technology spending and make a new budget to set your company up for success in 2022. With the rise of hybrid work and growing dependency on technology, it’s become more important than ever to invest in Technology Expense Management (TEM) to help cut costs, track services and equipment, and negotiate better contracts.
Call accounting originally grew from a core set of business needs that included cost validation and fraud detection. Enterprises often utilized call activity information to incentivize lower cost calling behaviors and manage traffic, and certain sectors—financial services and government among them—used call data to meet a range of compliance requirements. Companies also embraced call accounting for more mundane uses, such as cost center chargebacks based on consumption.
Rochester, NY October 6, 2021 - Calero-MDSL, the innovation leader in the high-growth Technology Expense Management (TEM) software space, announced today that it is promoting David Bliss, EVP of Product Management to Chief Product Officer. As Chief Product Officer for Calero-MDSL, David will lead the product management, design, and user experience teams as well as the learning and development organization. In this new role, David will continue to work in close partnership with the engineering team.
Your essential checklist to save, manage and optimize your digital communications spend.
Updated January 19, 2022
The transition of legacy PBX systems and other communication platforms from on-prem to cloud is happening at an unprecedented pace. This migration creates new challenges for enterprises trying to monitor communications usage and spend, from traditional forms of communication to UCaaS. Traditional tools can’t keep up with the need for better visibility into where telecom & UCaaS budgets are going and how to optimize the value of investments.
Join Amalgam Insights (Hyoun Park), Facebook (Daniel Garcia), Adobe (John Mockett) and Calero-MDSL (David Bliss) to explore key trends and salient recommendations in wireless expense management.
Why Calero-MDSL Managed Services?
Calero-MDSL was recently interviewed by Modern CTO Podcast, a group that explores thought leadership in the world of technology.
Updated January 19, 2022
Now more than ever, businesses in this globally connected world are turning to Unified Communications (UC) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions to enable seamless collaboration.
Corporate-owned personally enabled devices, or “COPE”, is a reemerging trend as enterprises continue to adapt to new ways of working. Where BYOD creates IT management and support complications, as well as security risk, the advantages of COPE programs include lower costs and lower risks. The key factor is that the approach also empowers employees to use these company owned devices for personal activities including social sites, e-mail, and calls, inevitably passing savings along to the employee, as well.
When you’re justifying the ROI of implementing Technology Expense Management (TEM), don’t just look at hard dollar paybacks, such as refunds for billing errors. Instead, consider the time and cost savings that are often overlooked:
Les systèmes existants de suivi des dépenses pourraient être un obstacle à la réalisation d’importantes économies.
Veraltete Kostenüberwachungssysteme könnten Ihr Unternehmen daran hindern, massive Kosteneinsparungen zu erzielen.
Legacy expense monitoring systems could be preventing your business from achieving massive cost-savings.
D’après un rapport du Transparency Market Research, la gestion des dépenses de télécommunications (GDT) pèsera 4,92 milliards de dollars aux États-Unis en 2024. Mais la GDT reste très sous-utilisée dans la zone EMEA (Europe, Moyen-Orient et Afrique) — malgré les économies qu’elle pourrait apporter aux entreprises.
Laut einem Bericht von Transparency Market Research wird das Marktvolumen von Technology Expense Management-Lösungen (kurz: TEM) in den USA bis 2024 etwa 4,92 Milliarden US-Dollar betragen. Trotz dieser vielversprechenden Aussichten wird TEM in Europa, dem Nahen Osten und Afrika noch zu selten genutzt. Und das, obwohl die Einsparungen für Unternehmen enorm sein können.
According to a Transparency Market Research report, technology expense management (TEM) will be worth $4.92 billion in the US by 2024. But, TEM remains an underutilised asset in Europe, the Middle East and Africa — despite the savings it could bring companies.
In Part 1, we examined the challenges enterprises face in effectively auditing SaaS spend. Billing practices for cloud services are complex and often disorganized, and traditional audit tools fall short. Now we’ll look at how businesses can overcome these difficulties, and the benefits they receive once they do.
In part 3 of our series on the Calero-MDSL Centers of Excellence, we take a closer look at 2 CoE’s and the impacts they have made to customers recently.
With all the industry buzz around BYO programs for businesses, it can be hard to know which to choose. With more employees working remotely than ever before, BYO is not going away any time soon, and seems to be growing more in popularity by the day. One device program that is gaining more adopters is what is called COPE, or Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled. As a hybrid between BYOD and Corporate owned device programs, COPE allows employees to use company owned devices for personal activities including social sites, e-mail, and calls while mitigating risks and lowering costs for the employer. This is a win-win for everyone, especially the company because of the hard and soft savings benefits of the program. The company lowers the cost of IT, licensing, security, maintenance, and even the cost of the plans and phones themselves.
Over two thirds of Americans have a smartphone and almost half have a tablet. With so many devices already in hand, many companies are implementing BYO programs. However, there are many things for a company to consider before electing to go BYO.
First, there needs to be a thorough understanding of the BYO approaches and their implications. The four types of programs companies can choose when dealing with devices and employees:
Data notifications received from vendors are being sent in increasing volumes and becoming harder for IT teams to manage. Many are not customer-specific and are irrelevant, causing unwanted “noise” and making it harder to spot the important changes that can impact your business.
Updated January 20, 2022
Do you know how much you’re really spending on telecom every year? What if you could see the hidden costs, know what telecom inventory you have, where that inventory is located, and why you have it?
Traditional enterprise fixed and mobile spend audits are a stable and mature service offered by every large expense management company as well as a plethora of smaller providers and independent analysts. These vendors have built a successful practice around finding billing errors or cost reduction opportunities for clients and sharing a percentage of the monies recovered or the savings achieved. From the early days of telecom expense management (TEM) to today, most enterprises take advantage of this standard service, either as a one-time engagement or on an ongoing basis.
BYOD is being used more and more for businesses in both terminology and practice.
But what exactly is BYOD, and what does it mean for companies? BYOD stands for Bring Your Own Device, and it allows employees to do work on their own devices to access a company’s network and data rather than rely on the company to provide the hardware. Upwork estimates that 1 in 4 Americans will be working remotely thru 2021 which further supports the popularity of BYOD. Millennials are also driving the trend, thinking their personal devices are more effective and easier to use than devices provided by their employers.
Fund managers in major financial services organizations and major banks truly depend upon a robust feed of market data to support their critical decision making. With trillions on the line its really no wonder that market data is in their top five expense items, topping $30 Billion in total spend in 2020.
In our first post on the Calero-MDSL Centers of Excellence (CoE) we described all seven centers and how they work together.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 22, 2021) - Calero-MDSL, a leading provider of Technology Expense Management (TEM) and Market Data Management solutions, today announced that their Index License Manager (ILM) product has been named the best Fintech Solution of 2021 as part of the annual SIIA CODiE Awards. The CODiE Awards recognize the companies producing the most innovative business technology products across the country, and around the world.
Index licensing fees have skyrocketed through valuation-based fee models that increasingly benefit index providers. The ILM platform reduces manual processes for both the buy-side and sell-side, automates reporting capabilities and vendor declarations, improves cost allocation methodologies (e.g. to funds), and helps conform with recently enforced benchmark regulations and IOSCO’s Principles for Financial Benchmarks. The centralized database contains index data licenses, benchmark licenses, reporting licenses, and all other index license types, with an intuitive user interface developed specifically for index license management. The result is an informed and complete holistic dashboard view of an organization’s enterprise-wide licensing with all index providers. Index License Management from Calero-MDSL has previously won the same SIIA CODiE Award in 2020.
“Congratulations to all of the 2021 Business Technology CODiE Award winners,” said SIIA President Jeff Joseph. “The products honored this year hold a particularly special place in the distinguished history of the CODiEs. Many of these winners literally helped business survive, and even thrive, as the global business community transitioned to remote status due to the pandemic. All those honored today demonstrate the resilience of this dynamic industry. Innovation continued even in the face of an unprecedented challenging year.”
Updated January 19, 2022
Large businesses are increasingly realizing they have a major problem around SaaS spend management. The use of cloud subscription services is going up but, unlike with traditional on-prem technologies, few companies had controls in place before the pace of SaaS and UCaaS adoption accelerated. And while SaaS applications were a lifeline for companies and workers when COVID-19 hit, the scope of expenses associated with so much cloud service sprawl is just now becoming clear.
2020 was undoubtedly a difficult time for everyone, but insurance companies were hit with costs from every direction.
Rochester, NY (June 8th, 2021) – Calero-MDSL, the leader in the high-growth Technology Expense Management (TEM) space, announced today its addition to the Zoom App Marketplace. The company is the first TEM provider to offer both a UCaaS expense management solution within its TEM platform, and a native Zoom app. With this certified Marketplace App, Calero-MDSL customers can now implement UCaaS expense management in minutes. In March, the company announced that it was first-to-market with a comprehensive solution for managing and optimizing both the variable and fixed costs associated with UCaaS programs integrated with its established wireline and mobility programs.
Shadow IT has long been a common business unit practice. When the wait for an approved solution from the corporate IT department feels too long, users navigate around the corporate policy and find their own solution. While there’s immediate relief to a pain point, there are compound long-term security and spend implications. How can an organization recover and take control?
Even the most benign of SaaS solutions can put a company at risk, functioning outside the parameters of IT security, privacy, and regulatory requirements. And the inherent challenge with SaaS, is that the risk is not a static moment in time. The institutional intelligence lives on in the cloud even as the user discontinues software usage. This means long-term exposure to both security breaches and spend.
Empowering users to do more is the fundamental goal of all automation. Automating repetitive or consistent tasks frees people to do more strategic, meaningful and valuable work.
Earlier we explored the challenges of managing UCaaS spend in today’s dynamic environment. Now we’ll take a broader look at the factors deepening the problem, including the widening SaaS market and its acceleration driven by the rapid evolution and transformation of enterprise-connected services, from traditional and hybrid managed to cloud and app managed.
In January 2021 Calero-MDSL announced our innovative Centers of Excellence service approach, an initiative built to deliver practice area thought leadership and establish the appropriate governance and processes to deliver best-in-class service for all clients.
Investments in companies that contribute to the best interests of our planet provide hope for a more sustainable future, while also producing long-term returns for investors. Asset managers are attracted, since they are under both direct risk from climate-related disasters impacting commodities and global economies and indirect risk such as changing consumer preferences and increasing scrutiny and pressure by governments and regulators.
The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated the transition to even greater use of mobile devices for personal communications. Many people preferred to use their company-provided smartphone rather than their home phone to keep in touch with everyone. Especially in companies using unified-communication-as-a-service (UCaaS), mobile was preferred for its direct access to the corporate network for calls, texts, video, and other data exchange with colleagues.
More mobile devices are being used by corporations than ever. Beyond simple calling there are many new applications emerging all the time. Also, its likely that a significant proportion of your employees use more than one mobile device. Some recent mobile applications include:
Do buzzwords like IIoT and WFA keep you up at night? Wondering how you can plan for the future of mobility now?
In this 30 minute session, you will learn from our panel of experts about emerging mobility technologies and how you can begin to incorporate them into your Mobility Management strategy today.
Updated January 18, 2022
While everyone recognizes that the global pandemic drove many to work from home, the broad impact on mobile computing and communications is more far-reaching than many may surmise.
ROCHESTER, NY - APRIL 20, 2021 Calero-MDSL, an established pioneer in the high-growth Technology Expense Management (TEM) software space, announced today that it has acquired MetaPort, the leading telecom network mapping software company.
MetaPort’s founder and CEO, Andres Aguire, will join the Calero-MDSL team as
part of the transaction. Calero-MDSL prospects and customers will soon be
able to turn network hardware and services data into powerful additional
insights that will allow them to leverage new technologies like SD-WAN or
reduce cost by identifying redundant or unused circuits.
Calero-MDSL is a recognized vendor on the report for the second year in a row
The pandemic has changed the way corporations do business, in some ways permanently. Many companies were forced to quickly adopt communication platforms such as Zoom to address an unprecedented need to support remote workers. The need for speed in embracing these UCaaS and SaaS services often bypassed normal business processes, and the lack of oversight coupled with the requirement to move quickly created the perfect environment for SaaS costs such as Zoom to go unchecked. In a recent Calero-MDSL survey, we found that 50% of enterprises don’t know their annual UCaaS spend.
Are you managing your technology expenses in-house, and are you finding that lack of insight into capacity and poorly integrated systems slow down productivity? You are not alone in this struggle, and this might not be the best strategy for your organization's long-term success.
With the number of mobile devices in use worldwide almost even with desktop computers, management of mobile devices becomes more critical than ever. Not just technical management or security management, but financial and liability management as well. There are fundamentally five variables to be considered in all permutations:
IDG’s CIO 100 award recognizes enterprise excellence and innovation in IT
Calero-MDSL, a leader in the high-growth Technology Expense Management
(TEM) software space, announced that it is making a significant expansion to
its solution offering by launching a Unified Communications-as-a-Service
(UCaaS) Expense Management module as part of its platform. The company is
the first-to-market with a comprehensive solution for managing and optimizing
both the variable and fixed costs associated with UCaaS programs integrated
with its established wireline and mobility programs.
It's a great bet that you never did any thinking about moving all your employees to work from home before we all had to do so at the start of the COVID pandemic. But have you done any thinking yet about how to best bring some or all of them back to the office when it ends?
Updated January 18, 2022
The secret sauce to a great relationship between clients and their technology expense management (TEM) provider is a blending of information, business insight, and interpersonal communication. When these three elements are combined properly, with healthy measures of trust and confidence stirred in, the results are a successful business relationship beneficial to everyone. This is the foundation of promoting a positive, proactive, and productive partnership.
Many enterprises are struggling to understand where they are spending their SaaS dollars from Cloud Communications (UCaaS) solutions such as Zoom, Teams, RingCentral, and Webex to Enterprise SaaS solutions such as Office 365. The result is a potentially large spend black hole that will continue to snowball over time without unified visibility across all of these UCaaS solutions.
"Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, businessman or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts, and varying interests."
As in almost all businesses, the rule for financial services firms, including banks, insurance, and other financial products, is to do more with less, mainly less personnel.
Summary:
“Rush” is responsible for creating more errors, more waste, and more frustration than most anything else. And much of what happens in a busy healthcare environment is done “stat”, in a rush.
Remote work and digital communications took center stage in 2020. As we start the new year on a more hopeful path, businesses must now focus on managing spend and consumption of the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams they added to support remote collaboration.
Company Continues to Invest in its Global Service Delivery Capability
Clearly, the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the retail sector more severely than any other. Many major retailers are halving their 2021 forecasts and closing store locations at a record pace. Those who have attempted to persevere have found fewer and fewer customers patronizing their stores.
Opportunities to waste money and spend needlessly abound in your budget line for telecom and related technology expense, mainly because there’s so much to keep track of, and so many ways to look at it.
It used to be that every employee in your company had a desk phone that you needed to keep track of. Today, they may still have a deskphone, but they also have a mobile smartphone, a tablet, a laptop computer, and perhaps even a desktop computer. Multiply by your company’s total headcount and you have one very substantial set of fixed assets to keep track of. But that’s just the beginning.
Most of these devices have telecom services associated with them. Users that travel or work outside the office may have a wireless access account.
Then there are the data and cloud services each user requires. Each needs a datacom service account as well as voice. You’ll want to provide the same productivity, communications, and collaboration platform to each so they can conference, work on documents together, and see each other no matter where each of them is located. Any cloud user must also have security, data backup, anti-malware, and other utility services to operate safely.
Do Nothing
The easiest way to waste money is to do nothing, that is, do nothing when an employee is terminated. Leave their mobile data, voice, and cloud accounts open. Don’t reassign their devices to anyone and instead go ahead and buy new ones. After a relocation, just leave the services at the former location fully provisioned so someone can pay a bill for services that are no longer in use. When you stop to think about it, many of these things can easily go unnoticed and remain completely invisible to you, perhaps until audit time. It happens more often than you’d imagine.
Depends on How You Look at It
Today’s technology expense management (TEM) solutions are rapidly developing an enhanced ability to interact with all this data to produce the kind of reports that will help you streamline your communications operations in every way possible. Reports can readily be scheduled with proactive alerts for stakeholders based on release or specific thresholds, and are refreshed whenever data is updated.
One dashboard can show you many things:
These dashboards enable those responsible for management of telecom and datacom expenses to drill down into any given data point from a variety of different perspectives or views. Once they’ve found what they’re looking for its easy to generate a report that answers the specific questions they have.
Sharing Insight
Nobody has a corner on all the good ideas, so the best TEM providers are sharing innovative report formats among all users of their dashboards, making it easy for other managers to explore their own data in new and perhaps more productive ways. Technology continues to grow as a proportion of your balance sheet. The more it grows, and the more your company grows, the more vigilance you need to maintain over these expenses. Talk to MDSL to learn more about how a quality TEM provider contributes to your bottom line.
Technology Expense Management (TEM) starts delivering value to clients far sooner than many might expect.
Updated January 18, 2022
How much money are you wasting? Specifically, how much are you wasting on telecommunications services and equipment by not having a budget and plan? For that matter, how many telecom accounts and how many phones and related equipment are floating around your organization?
Two of the valuable things you learn during a crisis like the one we’re struggling through are:
If the current pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we are far more dependent than we ever imagined on the more than 5 billion mobile devices in use in the world today. With so many information workers now working from home many are solely using their mobile phones to make and take all calls, access information, and do actual work than ever before.
It may be that pandemics end up teaching us much about how to most effectively manage global teams, greatly deepening our understanding, our appreciation, and our effectiveness in using today’s telecommunications technologies.
Calero-MDSL, a leader in the high-growth Technology Expense Management (TEM) software space, announced today that it has gained acceptance onto the UK government’s G-Cloud 12 Framework. Now on its 12th iteration, the G-Cloud Framework has opened up the market to IT suppliers of all sizes, enabling the UK government to more easily make the right technology and services investments from the right providers at the right price.
Bringing Clarity to the Complexity of Regional and Carrier-Specific Fluctuations
Calero-MDSL, a leader in the high-growth technology expense management (TEM) software space, announced today the release and availability of its powerful new enterprise telecom benchmarking solution.
Calero-MDSL, the global leader in technology expense management (TEM) and market data management, is happy to be awarded the Johnson Controls Supplier Leadership Award in Shareholder Value. Calero-MDSL was awarded virtually at an online Supplier Conference on November 9, 2020.
Calero-MDSL, a leader in the high-growth technology expense management (TEM) software space, announced today that its board of directors has chosen the company’s existing President Scott Gilbert to lead Calero-MDSL going forward, and that former CEO Charles Layne has stepped down from his position. Calero and MDSL, two leaders in the TEM space, merged in January 2020 in a transaction led by investors Riverside Partners and Oak Hill Capital to create Calero-MDSL. Since the merger, Gilbert has been responsible for leading the integration of the two companies across all functional areas, in addition to driving change across its global operations, product and technology organizations.
Telecom Expense Management (TEM) has transformed from management of just the telecom expenses to encompass all technology expenses across all spend categories, quickly becoming Technology Expense Management.
Calero-MDSL, a global leader in technology expense management (TEM) and market data management, announced its inclusion in Gartner’s 2020 Market Guide for Telecom Expense Management Services. Calero-MDSL is a Representative TEM Pure-Play Vendor for Global Delivery profiled by Gartner in the report. Those interested in learning more can access a complimentary copy of the Market Guide here.
Updated January 19, 2022
Deloitte Insights reports that companies spend 3.28% of their annual revenue on information technologies, so it's no wonder more and more want expert assistance managing their telecom, datacom, and other technology expenses. There are now several providers of telecom and technology expense management (TEM) services to choose from, and you are well-advised to carefully examine them during your selection process.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s move 40,000 people out of their offices and have them work from home starting tomorrow!”
Calero-MDSL, a global leader in technology expense management (TEM) and market data management, announced that it has hired Brian Brady as Chief Financial Officer. Brian joins an established executive team at Calero-MDSL focused on innovation and automation through software to simplify recurring-expense management for enterprise technology services. He will report to the Chief Executive Officer, Charles Layne.
In today’s environment, where firms are required to do more with fewer resources while dealing with increasing complexity in commercial index data policies and licensing models, it is becoming more and more difficult to ensure that index data usage is being managed effectively and that the cost of index data is controlled.
Calero-MDSL, a leading provider of Technology Expense Management (TEM) and Market Data Management (MDM) solutions, today announced a partnership with Jordan & Jordan, a prominent FinTech company providing market data, regulatory compliance and trading solutions across the securities industry, have partnered to provide a comprehensive Index License Management solution to the market. In combining Calero-MDSL’s award-winning Index License Manager (ILM) software with Jordan & Jordan’s best-in-class licensing services, the two companies now offer the most comprehensive Index Management solution in the industry.
Calero-MDSL, a leading provider of Technology Expense Management (TEM) and Market Data Management solutions, today announced that their Index License Manager (ILM) product has been named the Best FinTech Solution of 2020 as part of the annual SIIA CODiE Awards. The prestigious CODiE Awards recognize the companies producing the most innovative business technology products across the country, and around the world.
In 2020 the need to do more with less will continue to rise for those managing market data for their companies. Many financial institutions are looking for opportunities to introduce automation and integration to cut costs, while maintaining their service during transition.
Gartner has positioned Calero in its April 2020 Magic Quadrant for Managed Mobility Services, Global. Vendors included in the report have at least 1.15 million smart mobile devices under management and support at least 25% of their installed base outside their home region by the end of October 2019. A complimentary copy of the report is available for download here.
Three layers of regulatory compliance burden governments, businesses, financial institutions, and other organizations.
Internal Regulations – The information governance body within an organization creates authorized use policies (AUP) for their own employees to assure consistent and accountable use of information.
Calero-MDSL, a leading provider of Technology Expense Management (TEM) and Market Data Management (MDM) solutions, today announced that Index License Manager (ILM) was named a 2020 SIIA CODiE Award finalist in the Best FinTech Solution category. Finalists represent the best products, technologies, and services in software, information and business technology.
The spread of COVID-19 is having significant implications on organizations as they attempt to navigate diminishing or interrupted supply chains, increased mobile usage across remote employees and bandwidth utilization challenges.
To address these issues, we’ve put together a comprehensive webinar to help you successfully mitigate the potential impacts to your business during this time of uncertainty.
Mastering the Tangled Web of Cloud Expense Management
If your business continuity plan calls for an increase in your remote workforce, your organization is likely prioritizing the enablement of employees across the globe with access to corporate networks and data remotely, securely, and efficiently. As organizations rush to support the work from home mandate amid the COVID-19 outbreak, they must be fully prepared to address the unique challenges that mobility presents. If managed incorrectly, remote employees could end up costing organizations more money in unnecessary mobile expenditures, compliance issues and productivity loss. To address these challenges, we’ve put together several best practices to help you successfully navigate and mitigate the potential impacts to your business during this time of uncertainty.
Updated January 19, 2022
“The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” An article in The Economist from 2017 first informed us that “data is the new oil.” A year earlier a post on the IBM Business Analytics blog suggested that “data is the new bacon,” adding, “It sizzles; it’s crispy; it’s essential to the complete buffet.”
Calero-MDSL, a leading provider of Technology Expense Management (TEM) and Market Data Management (MDM) solutions, has been awarded Best Market Data Inventory Platform at the A-Team Group TradingTech Insight Awards – Europe 2020. The company received the honor during the award ceremony which took place in London on Tuesday, February 25th.
Telecom carriers offer little ability to customize the data structure of their telecom invoices. For the most part, invoice reports are architected from the carrier’s perspective (i.e., with emphasis on what needs to be paid). This structure is primarily due to regulatory and compliance standards around USOC (Universal Service Ordering Code), tariffs, rates, service types and products and automated Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). As a result, organizations must create workarounds that programmatically correlate the only customer-defined field in the invoice (i.e., the subaccount) with the appropriate cost center owner. They must also augment other information in the invoice feed to ensure the expenses are properly allocated in accordance to the current cost center assignments.
Let’s start this conversation with outlining the five areas where an effective cloud expense management program can help optimize the use of leased cloud technologies.
Rochester, NY — Calero-MDSL, a leading provider of Technology Expense Management (TEM) and Market Data Management (MDM) solutions announced today that it plans to move its current Rochester location from Henrietta to University Avenue in Rochester’s Neighborhood of the Arts (NOTA) area, expanding its operations center and adding many new jobs over the next five years.
Companies today spend a staggering amount on IT, technology and telecom services. Global spending on hardware, software, services and telecommunications is set to reach $4.8 trillion in 2023, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
When you bring together the various ways in which people can communicate, including text messaging, voice, video, screen sharing, whiteboarding, conferencing and more, you make it far easier and far more flexible for people to communicate in the most effective way possible. This is why so many companies, large and small, are moving from traditional phone systems to Unified Communication systems.
Phoenix, AZ and Rochester, NY — Calero Software and MDSL, two high growth software providers in the recurring Technology Expense Management (TEM) and Market Data Management (MDM) space, announced that they have completed their merger in a transaction led by Oak Hill Capital Partners and Riverside Partners. Financial terms of the merger were not disclosed.
The previously announced merger between Calero and MDSL has received government and regulatory approvals and the transaction has been completed. For now, we will be known as Calero-MDSL. This exciting news means we can execute on our joint vision to deliver innovative technology and service solutions to manage recurring technology spend that is unparalleled in our industry.
Look around yourself and count how many devices you have for the purpose of communicating. The first thing you spot is probably your desk phone which then reminds you of your mobile phone, and both probably feature voicemail. Think you’re done?
Phoenix, AZ and Rochester, NY — Calero Software and MDSL, two high-growth software providers in the recurring Technology Expense Management space, today announced plans to merge. Oak Hill Capital will make a significant new investment—joining Riverside Partners, Calero’s existing financial sponsor—as the lead investors in a growth re-capitalization of Calero and subsequent funding of the combination with MDSL. Sumeru Equity Partners (“SEP”), MDSL’s financial backer, will also continue as a significant investor in the combined business. The closing of the merger is expected in late Q4 or early Q1 and remains subject to customary regulatory and other approvals. Financial terms of the transactions were not disclosed.
Updated January 19, 2022
How much are you spending on mobile communications that you really don’t have to be spending? If you think the answer is “zero” or you really haven’t thought about it much, you may be in for an unexpected surprise. Good news, there are ways to get that number as close to zero as possible.
MDSL, a global leader in Market Data Management (“MDM”) and Technology Expense Management ("TEM") solutions, has announced a new technology solution with FactSet, a global provider of integrated financial information, analytical applications, and industry-leading service. FactSet Procure to Pay provides the first electronic data exchange to procure services, known as eBonding, between a market data management vendor and market data provider. The result is greater accuracy and increased automation in managing user entitlements for financial market data, leading to faster expense processing and reconciliation for procurement teams.
ETMA, the Enterprise Technology Management Association, announces five nominees for the Innovation of the Year award: Social Mobile, MDSL, Mobile Solutions, AMI Strategies and Auditmacs. This award supports ETMA's mission to raise industry standards, enhance the category image for its members and promote the value of Technology Management, Managed Mobility Services (MMS), and Telecom Expense Management (TEM).
The selection criteria will include:
1. Degree of Innovation… How innovative is this?
2. What has been the market response from clients?
3. How is the offering delivered?
4. How is the value proposition being achieved, fulfilled and validated in the marketplace?
Nominees will present and the winners will be selected, by peers at the upcoming ETMA conference September 24-26 in Atlanta.
"Managing cloud spend requires a tailored solution that can scale alongside the growth of enterprise cloud service usage as a whole," said Rob Stratton, Marketing Director at MDSL. "What we've developed at MDSL brings extended visibility and automation to managing cloud costs, leveraging a software platform that already manages billions of dollars in technology expenses for some of the largest organizations in the world."
"This year's nominees have impressive innovative technologies that have been introduced to the market," said Joe Basili, Managing Director of ETMA. Basili added, "The nominees' presentations at the upcoming support the conference theme of: faster, better, stronger."
ETMA's executive board has prepared a full agenda for the upcoming September 24-26 conference. In addition to networking activities and great information from presenters, the awards will showcase important industry developments.
ETMA, the Enterprise Technology Management Association is a non-profit organization with approximately 50 members managing over $71 Billion in enterprise expenses. Its ongoing mission is to raise awareness, foster industry growth, improve the quality and value of solutions, and establish industry standards. Further, ETMA members subscribe to a Code of Ethics, which clearly establishes standards and differentiates their level of commitment to their clients. ETMA does not sell consulting services or solutions.
Members provide solutions for enterprises in: Enterprise Technology Management, Managed Services, Expense Management, Telecommunications Management, Telecom Expense Management (TEM), Mobile Expense Management, Managed Mobility Services (MMS), Mobile Device Management MDM and Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions and other related areas.
Let’s think big.
A multi-national company operating in about 1,000 locations spread among more than 25 countries will likely require 30,000 telecom circuits of varying kinds to support perhaps 400,000 phone extensions costing about $150,000,000 per year. Each month anywhere from 3% to 5% of those circuits and phone extensions get added, disconnected, upgraded, downgraded or otherwise changed.
12,900 to 21,500 changes. Who is keeping track of all that? How? And how many mistakes may be made each month? Overcharges, undercharges, charges for disconnected services, services that should have been disconnected but weren’t.
Updated January 18, 2022
Communication is one of those things you truly depend upon to run your business. There are several telecom providers that provide your telecom services, and each one has its own rules, its own pricing programs, its own requirements, and more.
International Software Awards Program Announces Finalists and MDSL’s Technology Expense Management Platform Makes the List
The 5G hype-train has left the station. It's probably the hottest tech conversation happening right now. And it's way too premature. There's still a lack of clear understanding of exactly what 5G is or will be capable of delivering.
You might have plenty of data, but what are you doing with this data? Moreover, what is the data doing for you and your enterprise?
Data and analytics ultimately the drive spending decisions of future cloud, network, mobility and the overall IT budgets — so it’s imperative your enterprise is up-to-date on the latest capabilities. When used right, business intelligence (BI) can reveal your technology infrastructure’s pain points, illuminate where expenses are occurring and where they might be reduced, support benchmarking, and provide predictive and prescriptive analytics. BI can empower organizations to gain insight into new opportunities, assess demand and measure suitability of different services.
But what BI developments really have a measurable impact in streamlining and improving everyday processes — while also reducing costs? We narrowed it down to five of the most game-changing trends in BI for IT Finance teams.
Dynamic and Visual Reporting
With the ultra-modern capabilities offered by some BI platforms, digesting, analyzing and sharing relevant, real-time business insights is becoming easier and more intuitive. Today’s dynamic dashboard interfaces are able to simplify and display enormous amounts of data with applicable and responsive visual aids, such as:
• At-a-glance, easy-to-digest charts and graphs presenting a quick overview of usage and account activity.
• Map-based visualizations that allow enterprises to keep tabs on services spanning cities and other geographies. If a company is undergoing a major re-organization, this perspective can help your enterprise see where services are still active — and eliminate unnecessary recurring expenses.
• Calendar visualizations that offer visibility in terms of deadlines, contract renewals, invoicing and delivery dates.
Self-Service
Dashboards are increasingly designed with a self-service mentality, allowing users to build reports to display the data exactly how they want. IT teams can adjust the dashboard to fit their preferences — aesthetically and functionally. Personalization saves time, as users won’t need to sift through piles of irrelevant data to extract the information they need.
Without self-service capabilities, users need to export raw data into Excel spreadsheets so they can manually manipulate the data and distribute it to others. This a time-consuming, non-reproductible process that slows decision-making. Further, some BI vendors charge additional fees to create specified reports time-consuming and non-reproductible, slowing down decision-making.
Role-based Visibility
Your migration to cloud computing was a great decision. You’ve all-but-eliminated any capital investments on equipment. You’ve removed many operating expenses, too, including rent, electrical power, HVAC space cooling, equipment maintenance, on-staff administrators and managers, and more. You’ve replaced all of that with a single monthly expense that is consistent, predictable, and budgetable.
Or is it?
One of the Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing
In 2011, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) published "The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing.” One of the “Essential Characteristics” listed in this brief document is:
Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.
This coordinates elegantly with another essential cloud characteristic, “resource pooling.” Economies are achieved by having all users share from one pool of resources, requesting them and releasing them as needed. Finally, another essential service, “measured service” enables cloud service providers to measure all utilization and bill each user only for the services and resources they’ve actually used.
This has translated into one of the most attractive customer benefits of cloud computing, the fact that you only pay for the resources you’ve used. This is commonly referred to as “consumption-based billing” and it would seem like a wonderful advantage, which it is… as long as it is managed properly.
Managing Cloud Expenses
American author Thomas Charlton first wrote in 1809 that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
Applied here, cloud has dramatically reduced not only capital and operating costs, it has also minimized customer involvement in operating their own IT environment. While that is indeed “liberating” in that it frees personnel to accomplish far more important and valuable activities, cloud spending requires constant vigilance. Failure to exert such vigilance may often result in very unpleasant surprises. Some of these may even be career-threatening.
After a few months, invoices arrived. But some of these invoices didn’t resemble the subscription’s indicated maximum because some of these new cloud arrivals had overrun their intended limits. They consumed too much cloud. In some cases, way too much cloud. These unfortunates found themselves holding unanticipated invoices for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even today, those who are just now adopting cloud computing are struggling to improve their governance to prevent a proliferation of uncontrolled cloud projects.
Cloud and Your Offboarding Process
When new personnel join your cloud-computing-based-company, you routinely purchase them subscriptions for the services they will use.
Or do you first check to see if you already have “seats” that were formerly used by someone who has left your company? Many companies neglect to include cloud subscriptions in their offboarding checklist, and don’t have an accounting procedure in place to tick and tie the number of users to the number of “seats” currently under subscription.
The result is the purchase of new subscriptions when there is still time left on idle ones. Then, that usable time simply runs out unused.
The New Cloud Expense Accounting
The migration from on-premise to cloud computing brings with it a need to migrate from on-premise-style accounting to new processes designed specifically for cloud-computing environments. In turn, these new processes require the support of systems designed specifically for Cloud Service Expense Management (CSEM). This includes visibility and management of cloud service consumption well before you exceed thresholds, and that you use existing resources before you buy new. More fundamentally, CSEM enables you to track and reconcile all of your cloud services to approve payment of invoices with confidence.
An efficient, effective CSEM solution also interfaces directly with SAP, Oracle, or whatever enterprise resource management (ERP) solution your company depends upon to run the business.
With acceptance and adoption of cloud computing fast becoming the standard, the need for CSEM has increased dramatically. MDSL has enhanced our popular Technology Expense Management (TEM) to create a new, powerful CSEM solution that allows you to manage your cloud spend as closely as you manage every other cloud performance factor. To learn more, click here.
MDSL, a global leader in Technology Expense Management ("TEM") solutions, was recently chosen by Alight Solutions to provide TEM software and services to manage more than $25 million in annual telecom expenditures. After administering an RFP to see what was available in the marketplace, MDSL was selected to implement a single, centralized TEM application to house their telecom inventory and proactively manage their recurring telecom expenses.
The demand for telecom expense management (TEM) systems to leverage automation is increasing. Matching contracts with a high volume of invoices take financial teams too much time to execute and high error rates are inevitable. On top of that, manual operation of these complex tasks makes it nearly impossible for CIOs to extract any useful business intelligence from the data that comes out of their enterprise-wide TEM engagement.
Updated January 18, 2022
Enterprise mobility management services are generally for large businesses and organizations that rely on remote capabilities to drive their workforce often struggle to keep pace with the market’s increasing dependence on mobile technology. These mobile devices play a critical role in the day-to-day function across company departments and enable the flow of information across geographic regions of large businesses. Having a strong Managed Mobility Services (MMS) platform in place is how the most successful companies are keeping pace with an evolving mobile landscape.
New Governance Process Required to Audit Benchmark Usage Effective 1 January 2018
