Gain Control With Technology Expense Management

Businesses wishing to manage costs, whilst taking advantage of digital transformation as a tool for growth, can no longer simply apply a reactive fear-based cost-cutting approach. With the growing number of IOT devices and cloud-based as-a-service charges that are present in already sprawling ICT environments, such an approach simply does not work.

Enterprises need to get a firm grip on their growing technology expenses so that they can make proactive and informed choices. This is an issue that technology expense management (TEM) software and tools can easily address.

TEM is not a reactive tool but is a proactive method to become more competitive in the global marketplace. TEM services enable enterprises’ procurement, finance and IT departments to support and manage costs of large-scale corporate communications, associated IT services and their inventories − such as fixed and mobile telephony, cloud spend, and IOT connectivity. TEM services also offer business intelligence and global reporting tools that can support and inform strategic decision-making.

TEM has become more necessary than ever as technology expenses are showing exponential growth in line with the explosion of the everything as a service (XAAS) business model. Gartner recently reported that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23.1% in 2021 to total $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020. 

Infrastructure-as-a-service at 38.5% and desktop-as-a-service at 67.7% are predicted to see the highest growth in 2021, as businesses face continued pressures to scale infrastructure that supports moving complex workloads to the cloud and meets the demands of hybrid workforces.

As such, technology is viewed as one of the leading organisational sources of expenses with a move away from long-term projects, to a model of short-term operational expenses with monthly contracts turning services ‘on’ and ‘off’ at will. This subscription model which many providers offer, including O365, AWS and Salesforce, can become a recipe for disaster if not managed effectively.

Many large enterprises are struggling in this environment and losing control when confronted with a sprawling tech landscape. Indeed, countless large enterprises are still reconciling and allocating expenditure using antiquated spreadsheets and other disparate solutions, and in doing so, are putting their businesses at risk.

Undertaking that convoluted approach is leading to many organisations paying for mobile contracts for employees who have long since left, paying for software nobody uses, overlooking vendor service fees that were not agreed to, or failing to scale down on cloud services used for campaigns long-since completed. However, a management platform, such as a TEM solution, can provide clear visibility over each contract on a single platform ensuring that your enterprise has total control over IT spend.

Would you like help with any of these issues?