New year, same goal: optimize costs across the enterprise. Nearly 60% of CFOs rank it as their top priority for 2026, according to a new Gartner study. Nowhere is this more evident than IT, where teams must scrutinize every dollar of technology spend in a “pedal-to-the-metal” era of innovation that’s convoluting costs at every turn.
In a 2024 KPMG study, more than half of executives said they don’t have the budget to keep pace with technology advancements. Staying on the right side of this curve in 2026 means being proactive and considering the possibilities ahead, from evolving mobility strategies and legacy migrations to unscrambling the behemoth that is AI spend.
Tangoe’s leaders are anticipating some key changes in mobile, cloud, and telecom technologies that will shape how enterprises manage their spend in the next year. Below are the predictions we believe will shape the future, and how organizations can navigate these developmentsand seize new opportunities.
Mobile Technology Predictions
As multi-SIM devices increase and expose gaps in visibility and allocation, 2026 marks a turning point for multi-SIM cost management.
According to IDC, more than half of all devices shipped in 2024 supported eSIM technology. While we don’t have 2025 numbers yet, analysts project that the dual-SIM market will grow by more than 65% by 2031 – indicating continued growth this year.
Tangoe predicts that 2026 will mark a turning point as reactive approaches to multi-SIM cost management expose their limits. What looks like a minor hardware detail is becoming a major cost driver, driven by the rise of hybrid work and SIM-swapping, turning multi-SIM devices into a snowballing expense risk.
Not all mobile expense management platforms are built to handle this level of complexity. Systems that weren’t designed, and have not evolved, for today’s multi-SIM reality fall short on visibility, cost allocation, and optimization. Manual tracking only compounds the problem:constant reconciliation, manual data manipulation, spreadsheet sprawl, and after-the-fact fixes…it’s just not sustainable at scale.
Leading organizations will have the right visibility, policies, and controls to plug budget holes and sharpen their financial edge in 2026.
See how Tangoe One Mobile keeps multi-SIM devices in check.
As threats move faster and onto the device, real-time endpoint detection and protection become undeniable.
Analysts predict the global Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) market will grow from $3B in 2024 to roughly $12B by 2030. A 4x market expansion in six years doesn’t happen unless the risk is real and persistent. MTD is a critical layer of protection against phishing attempts, SIM-jacking, and other device-level threats that traditional mobile management tools can’t see. This projection reflects a clear shift in enterprise priorities, which is great to see considering that only 35% of companies had MTD in place in 2025 according to IDC.
Tangoe’s experts predict that 2026 will be a pivotal year for MTD, with a wave of organizations prioritizing persistent, on-device intelligence that continuously adapts to risk. Enterprises will rely more heavily on real-time monitoring, behavioral signals, and automated enforcement at the device level – an always-on, always-learning, deeply integrated mobile security strategy.
See how Tangoe delivers full stack security and ROI.
Fragmentation will wane as enterprises square up against system sprawl.
One-third of organizations polled by Deloitte last year said their top priority over the next two years is optimizing or upgrading the mobility technology they already have. That tees up 2026 as the year companies stop chasing new tools and start fixing fragmented stacks.
Here are three actions you can take if you fall into this camp:
- Sweat existing assets (i.e., consolidation, contract optimization, usage cleanup) instead of investing in new tools that add complexity and costs.
- Look at a Managed Mobility Services (MMS) platform that unifies data, workflows, and governance instead of point tools.
- Ensure your platform includes mobile expense management so you’re killing two birds with one stone. By this, we mean real-time visibility, shared cost allocation, detailed financial reporting, and ongoing optimization driven by usage data. The most advanced platforms, like Tangoe One Mobile, are purpose-built to deliver this level of visibility and governance across mobile spend at scale.
Cloud Technology Predictions
FinOps Will Turn Financial Control into an Innovation Engine
Fragmented systems and limited visibility make financial control feel like a brake on innovation. With no true understanding of how costs behave or where spend is going – and no time to slow down – forecasts stay skewed, reactive, and unreliable.
As IT expense management matures into a strategic priority and FinOps-aligned platforms make real-time visibility and control possible, we’re finally seeing expense management and innovation work as enablers versus inhibitors. 2026 will be marked by the rise of cleaner data, cleaner spend, and smarter bets. The most innovative teams won’t spend the most – they’ll spend the smartest.
As AI workloads scale and costs spike, 2026 becomes the year enterprises are forced to apply FinOps discipline to AI spend.
Large enterprises will underestimate their AI infrastructure costs by 30% through 2027, IDC predicts, which explains why the number of organizations tracking or managing AI-related spend doubled from 2024 to 2025. We expect this number to continue to grow, with FinOps becoming the default framework for doing so.
It didn’t take long for AI to expose the limits of traditional cloud cost management controls, let alone manual approaches. Winning enterprises will carve out a lead that competitors will struggle to close by adopting FinOps-certified platforms, which are purpose-built to deliver deepvisibility, accurate allocation, ongoing optimization, and AI-specific cost dashboards. As enterprise AI becomes standard and FinOps expands in scope, the two will converge in a powerful and necessary way in 2026.
Explore Tangoe’s FinOps-certified platform.
With the right tooling finally in place, Kubernetes will emerge as a major cost-saving opportunity without sacrificing performance.
It’s understandable that teams prioritize Kubernetes uptime and performance over costs, but it’s an expensive tradeoff. By 2023, half of organizations were reporting that Kubernetes was increasing and complicating their cloud costs.
As the waste piles up, FinOps expands into containerized environments, and the savings of purpose-built platforms becomes clear – up to 59% on average, studies show – Kubernetes becomes one of the biggest untapped cost-saving opportunities in 2026.
Enterprises will focus on rightsizing, workload placement, and utilization tracking as core financial priorities, with leading organizations using platforms like Kubex that deliver deep insight and strategic cost governance to create a strong financial impact.
Learn how Tangoe works with Kubex to turn Kubernetes into a lean, mean, money-saving machine.
Telecom Technology Predictions
As AI and hybrid architectures push data centers toward recurring, usage-driven cost models, enterprises will need to start applying telecom-style governance to regain control.
2026 will be all about bringing inventory accuracy, contract benchmarking, and usage validation into the data center to uncover redundancy, over-provisioning, and legacy costs that have gone largely unchecked. This shift has been slowly building, and we’ll see it really shine this year to redefine how enterprises manage their data center costs.
Advisory services become essential as more organizations look for their telecom provider to guide innovation.
In a 2025 study conducted by Capgemini, 61% of organizations said they want their telecom service provider to act as a source of innovation. In other words, actively helping drive new capabilities and better outcomes. While this certainly involves technology – delivering integrated, flexible solutions that support how businesses operate, grow, and go digital – it’s just as much about advisory support.
Enterprises want providers to advise on modern architectures like SD-WAN, untangle decades of telecom sprawl (more on this in the next point), and map connectivity decisions to business outcomes. It’s about having true experts they can rely on for inventory cleanup, legacy migration, benchmarking, and building future roadmaps. Tangoe expects to see this front and center in 2026.
See how Tangoe’s technology consulting and advisory services save customers $250M annually.
POTS: 2025 policy changes will accelerate the inevitable in 2026.
While there’s still no official end date for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), 2026 will continue to see costs rise, service quality decline, and migration options narrow under time pressure.
Last year saw some major shake-ups, especially with the FCC removing longstanding hurdles to copper retirement – effectively marking the start of a faster, more aggressive phase-out timeline. We also saw AT&T stop accepting new POTS orders in multiple states starting in Octoberof 2025. The provider plans to retire most of its copper network by 2029, with FCC approval to discontinue legacy services in portions of its footprint starting this year.
POTS costs will continue to rise sharply in 2026 while availability and support decline. The choice is no longer whether to transition, but how quickly and strategically it can be done.
Looking Ahead
Whether it’s mobility, cloud, or telecom, the same advantages separate leaders from laggards. Enterprises that invest in optimization, governance, and trusted expertise will gain control and flip IT expense management on its head.
IT expense management in 2026 will be about enabling smarter decisions, faster innovation, and sustainable growth in an increasingly complex technology landscape. See how Tangoe One delivers it all in one solution.