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Gwyn Graff and John Johnson attend the welcome reception at "Club Advocate"
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Last week,
Tangoe held its Connections 2012 event in Orlando FL for their customers. As a Strategic Alliance Partner, we participated (Platinum sponsor) and learned about the 2013 product roadmap. CEO, Al Subbloie kicked off the event with a perspective of how communications is core to any company and that the latest figures show organizations worldwide spend over $425 billion for fixed communications. With only 5% of the market utilizing an Expense Management platform there are huge opportunities to contain costs in the future.
Key Trends1. Mobile proliferation of devices with hybrid BYOD/CYOD programs
2. Identifying alternative expenses from external networks, personal networks, and consumer networks (i.e Starbucks WiFi)
3. Impact of Social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
4. Carriers mergers and acquisitions
5. Machine to Machine (M2M) or SIM enabled devices projected to be over 200 million devices in 2014
Other trends range from global expansion and centralization to the difficult task of leveraging your buying power to the lack of visibility into overall internal costs. Companies today will also need to have visibility into networks such as Dropbox, Box, Yammer and other public/private services.
Several key areas of investment for Tangoe are sure to benefit users including a new procurement portal, cost analyzer, business intelligence engine, and budget/forecasting module. The audience was impressed and all the questions were targeted to "when can I get this." Several case studies were presented on best practices, policies, and ways to get internal senior level management support on key projects. American Airlines presented their success story and showed how the internal team created a Savings Hero cartoon that explained how they saved several millions in IT spend. Who knew that a finance department could be so creative!
Finally, the event had two transformation discussions led by our Co-Founder Tim Wise, and Scott Klososky - a technology futurist. Tim's
presentation focused on the rapid pace of change and how companies need to create a 3 to 5 year roadmap today before the tactical challenges take you in the wrong direction. And Scott's talk introduced the audience to the Outboard brain. Check out his
website for some great information.
The recently announced merger will certainly affect the wireless market, but it will have little beneficial impact on enterprise communications. T-Mobile admittedly entered this market to bolster its position as the fourth largest U.S. carrier, but has its roots firmly in retail sales. Whereas VZW, AT&T and Sprint have gained share, T-Mobile has been a steady loser for the past few years. The result is a fighting retreat by T-Mobile - using a low-price position to slow its steady enterprise market share loss.
A team of nine Advocate Consulting staff members volunteered at the Furniture Bank of Metro Atlanta on September 28th.