An Interview with Mark Evans, CEO of Telecom Expense Management Solutions Vendor Quickcomm
Executive Editor, IP Communications Group
Quickcomm (www.quickcomm.com), founded in Australia in 1997, is a major provider of Telecom Expense Management (TEM) software solutions, which helps enterprises not only gain visibility into their telecom spending but also actionable insight into their telecom provisioning, thus enabling them to optimize telecom expenditures and improve the bottom line. Their partners include the world's largest integrators as well as blue-chip corporations on five continents including Citigroup, British Telecom, Siemens, Kraft, BP, Merrill Lynch and Johnson & Johnson. Quickcomm has done business in the U.S. since 2000 and is headquartered in New York City.
Quickcomm’s CEO, Mark Evans, says, “There are enterprises that spend tens or even hundreds millions of dollars a year on telecommunications. That encompasses data networking and its infrastructure, all of their wireless devices such as cell phone, Blackberries, pagers, and so forth, and all their voice communications infrastructure such asPBX systems. In addition, a corporation might take upon itself the liability for home services, such as DSL and Internet access, for their employees. What happens is that you end up with an enormous telecom expense which is growing all the time. The reason it’s growing is because people are using more and more telecom services as technology grows – the appearance of AirCards and wireless broadband service, for example. Interestingly, just over the weekend I bought a PC that has an AirCard built into it. If this becomes the norm, then that means that every time somebody buys a PC, you’ve also got a communications service on hand that’s associated with it. So telecom expenses keep increasing.”
“Where the issue arises is where these corporations get up into the tens of millions of dollars in telecom expenses and they realize that they don’t have a good handle on these expenditures,” says Evans. “Are the bills accurate? Should it really be $20 million or could there be services and infrastructure that’s not being used? Or perhaps they could get a better rate from the carrier, and so forth.”
“The reason all of this hasn’t been grasped by the big ERP vendors such as SAP or Oracle (News - Alert) Financials, is because it’s a complex issue,” says Evans. “It’s not as simple as leasing 10,000 photocopiers and counting the number of pages that go through the machines each month. Telecom is complex.”
“If you have one cell phone and your bill appears once a month, it’s not that hard to check your usage and verify the billing. But if you’re dealing with 100,000 items, it’s a whole different kettle of fish,” muses Evans.
“There’s essentially a ‘disconnect’ within the large corporations,” says Evans. “You have the IT group, whose job it is to keep up the infrastructure of the company. These data people are responsible for keeping all of the data circuits up and running and keeping all of the computers connected together. The voice part is responsible for making sure that the phones are on people’s desks, and they connect to PBXs as extensions, and so forth. And then of course there’s wireless. Everybody has their personal wireless devices. So that’s the role of people working within the corporate infrastructure from day to day – there’s enough on their plate just to keep in the infrastructure going, without worrying about the invoices that come in for the services.”
“On the other side of the coin, you’ve got the finance department, which is receiving from the carriers various invoices, which are usually on paper, for these tens of thousands of individual services that people are using in the infrastructure – things ranging from a cell phone to a data line,” says Evans. “So there is a distinct disconnect between the IT and finance departments. The people who pay the invoices are actually not aware as to whether the invoices accurately describe the usage of services with which the IT people are intimate from day to day. It’s very hard for the finance people to be able to reconcile that, given a paper invoicing environment. They would have to go through literally thousands and thousands of pages of these invoices and carry them over to the IT department and ask, ‘Are these charges correct? Is this circuit correct? Is this cell phone right?’ and so forth. Obviously they can’t do it in a paper-based environment.”
“What’s changed in the past few years is that the carriers – the AT&T’s (News - Alert), Qwests. BellSouths and Verizons, will issue electronic billing for their corporate clients if the clients ask them to do so,” says Evans. “So the carriers will stop sending paper and they’ll send CDs or they’ll send EDI files, or some sort of electronic media which contains all of that billing information. Now if you can get the IT people to use a centralized system, such as our Quickcomm software, to maintain their inventory and ‘image’ of the corporate infrastructure, you can then feed that electronic billing data from the carriers directly into it, and now you’ve got a computer system capable of reconciling what’s on an invoice with actual usage. The enterprise can now heal the gap or disconnect between the finance group and the IT group. That’s important.”
“Now a system is able to automatically find errors in the billing.” says Evans. “‘Oh look, there are five circuits [lines] listed on this invoice that are not in fact in my infrastructure.’ Or, ‘Oh look, there are circuits listed on this invoice that I cancelled two months ago.’ Or, ‘Oh look, there is billing here for a branch office that’s been closed.’ Or billing for employees that have left the company, and that sort of thing.”
“Taking this ability a step further, ‘When I ordered all of these circuits from the carrier, I signed a contract that says I should buy these circuits at a certain rate, and services at a certain rate, but now here the carrier is billing me rates for these circuits at a different rate than those upon which we agreed.’ So you can find carrier errors,” says Evans.
“At the moment we’re seeing a growth in this TEM industry now of around 30 percent a year,” says Evans. “That’s because these big corporations are now becoming aware that telecom expense management – I’d rather call it ‘telecom resource management’ because it encompasses infrastructure as well as billing – is something that you can take control of. If you’ve got a $100 million bill and some of the charges are incorrect, there’s something you can do about it to put it right. The chances are that the charge error within your current invoice and annual expenditures is around 10, 15 or even 18 percent. So if you’re talking about a big $100 million a year invoice, clearly you can save a lot of money, if you just manage things using our technology.”
“So that’s why our TEM industry is growing at the moment,” says Evans. “The analysts and ourselves think that in 2008 TEM will continue to grow at another 30 percent and so on, as people become more and more aware that there’s something you can do about erroneous billing.”
“Popular opinion holds that what the TEM industry is doing is ‘beating up’ the carriers and finding mistakes in their billing systems,” says Evans. “Now, do the carriers’ billing systems make errors? Of course. They’re big complex systems. But I believe that what needs to be managed better are any given corporation’s own affairs. Do they actually need as many lines as they have? Do they need cell phones and wireless service, or should they have cut them off months ago? This all ties into inventory management. Our software continually reconciles the information that’s on the invoice against the inventory that you have.”
Quickcomm's telecom cost management software solution can reconcile telecom invoices to a corporation’s inventory. It automatically analyzes every single line item, from mobile and cellular voice services to tie lines, paging services, data and PBX. Quickcomm's TEM software delivers automatic reconciliation of telecom bills down the line-item level, reports of charges for lines or services that are not in your inventory, reports of charges by personnel who are no longer with your company, allocation of telecom expenses by cost center, and analysis of telecom infrastructure usage to help guide provisioning.
By now having such information, enterprises can cut the cost of their telecom infrastructure immediately, eliminate "leaks" in their telecom cost structure, and provision their telecom services in line with their actual usage, usually preventing cost creep.
Indeed, Quickcomm software is the engine behind the telecom expense management practice of CSC, one of the world's largest IT outsourcers.
After listening to Evans, Your Truly has a strong hankering to take another look at past phone bills…
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Richard Grigonis is an internationally-known technology editor and writer. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) as Executive Editor of its IP Communications Group, he was the Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine (News - Alert) from its founding in 2003 to August 2006. He also served as the Chief Technical Editor of CMP Media’s Computer Telephony magazine, later called CommunicationsConvergence ( News - Alert), from its first year of operation in 1994 until 2003. In addition, he has written five books on computers and telecom (including the Computer Telephony Encyclopedia and Dictionary of IP Communications). To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
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