This is going to seem like a bit of a stretch, but when it’s your blog, you can do what you want. I am going to compare an oil spill to TMaaS (Telecom Management as a Service). Here goes nothing. I was working away last night and had CNN on in the background. The oil spill story was again dominating the news. Without getting off onto a complete tangent, I do need to say, what a ridiculous display of finger pointing, tail covering and general lack of initiative that was. We can put a man on the moon but we can’t fix a #&#@& leaking oil well? Wait until the globs of oil start washing up on the beaches of Martha’s Vinyard……
The obvious question is how in the heck this relates to telecom. Fair enough. As I was watching the news story I was taken back by how different the public outcry is because of the information we are receiving. Many decisions will be made based on this visibility (aka; knowledge). More knowledge = Better decisions. If there were no cameras on the scene, imagine how difficult it would be to make decisions on what to do. Can you sense the segue coming?
Again, I realize it’s a stretch to compare the two but it comes down to one simple concept and that is, of course, knowledge is power. I spend the bulk of my day working on telecom cost reduction projects. As you can imagine, anything with cost reduction tied to is it pretty popular these days. Telecom expenses are certainly no exception. Telecom Expense Management software continues to gain popularity as the need to manage expense grows to unprecedented levels. The problem with TEM is that it only M’s the E of the T. Managing the expense aspect of your telecom is a huge step in the right direction. The problem is that there is more to the telecom environment than just the expense piece. Using TMaaS (Telecom Management as a Service) will not only provide the complete visibility into the monthly telecom spend that you need but add many more (equally valuable) layers of information. I will give an example of this and then back to CNN. Imagine a tool that offers all of the TEM tools PLUS, it show you in real time, the status of every upcoming installation, pending disconnect, active trouble ticket, open billing inquiry and an archive of all of the above once they are closed. More knowledge = Better decisions. Try and put a value on this kind of real time information.
TEM is great but TMaaS is better. Why take a cab when you can go in a limo (for less).
