GUIDES

What is Technology Expense Management?

Technology Expense Management is the process of effectively managing expenses and services to minimize costs, fully utilize resources, and drive process efficiencies in financial management. Technology Expense Management software and services offer a centralized platform to track, monitor, and optimize costs and service usage particularly for cloud, telecom, and mobile technologies. Solutions typically serve IT, finance, and procurement teams by providing:

  • Deep visibility into costs and any wasted technology services, resources, or assets,
  • Recommended ways to save money or better utilize purchased services
  • Automated systems and processes to speed financial management and governance practices.

Tangoe One is the name of Tangoe’s Technology Expense Management solution, and it’s the industry’s first such platform helping companies of all sizes control their cloud, mobile, and telecom costs.

Read more about Technology Expense Management with Tangoe One.

As companies continue to invest in Generative AI and emerging technologies to drive innovation, they need to ensure they address the natural side effect of overspending. Inflation is also a key reason for keeping a lid on technology expenditures, as it offsets higher prices. By lowering tech costs, companies can also fuel more digital innovation for their business, making digital transformation sustainable for the future. Tracking costs is also helpful in helping executives track and trace the business benefits from their new investments in emerging technologies like GenAI. Learn more about how GenAI is triggering more cloud spending, and how CIOs are controlling costs as they make more tech investments.

As a company that tracks $15B in IT spending across diverse industries, Tangoe estimates that companies overspend on IT by 20% on average, with the majority of waste coming from cloud applications and infrastructure services as well as mobile devices and calling plans. Telecom services are also a key source of IT overspending. Technology Expense Management enforces cost governance and usage efficiency parameters that help companies thrive by managing a growing number of technology expenses and IT assets efficiently in one comprehensive platform.

Adopting Technology Expense Management software is necessary for gaining overarching insight, driving resource and financial efficiencies, achieving financial predictability, and making digital innovation sustainable for the long-term. Technology Expense Management software is also credited with helping executives avoid common sources of overspending and instead connect IT spending to business value, improve IT budgets and innovation performance, and reap higher returns on technology services thus achieving ROI faster on technology investments. You can stay up to date in 2024 by reading our 2024 IT Trends and Savings Recommendations.

Technology Expense Management makes quick sense of even the most complex IT environments, using analytics, automation, and reporting to pinpoint waste, act on cost savings recommendations, and improve resource utilization. Tangoe One harnesses the power of AI and hyper-automation to reduce costs and simplify financial management even further.

Tangoe’s platform includes wide-sweeping integration and advanced AI analytics, applying automation at every turn for automated savings and peak performance. For example, hyper-automated invoice workflows prevent late fees and service outages while hyper-automated verification processes flag billing errors. The solution also delivers significant soft savings with improved productivity and streamlined management, allowing for faster, more effective financial management that bridges the needs of both IT and finance teams.

Taking steps to reduce your costs is important amid economic uncertainties. Tangoe One is helpful in creating room in the budget, even when budgets are flat or shrinking. It ensures you are only paying for what you need to succeed based on today’s usage and tomorrow’s expectations.

Check out these reports to learn more about the importance of Technology Expense Management and how the right solution reduces costs:

Tangoe One is a complete technology expense and lifecycle management solution for telecom, mobile, and cloud technologies.

Telecommunications: Telecommunications, or telecom, services describe a range of technologies and systems that electronically exchange data. This includes basic communication services like voice (fixed and mobile), closed computer networks, and the public internet.

Telecommunications is the backbone of business operations, but with more users and ways to connect, staying on top of telecom costs has become more difficult than ever. Tangoe One Telecom, our telecom expense management (TEM) solution, can help you maximize ROI by driving efficiency, cost savings, predictability when it comes to your telecom expenses.

Learn more about Tangoe One Telecom, Tangoe’s Technology Expense Management solution for telecom services.

Mobility: Mobility includes a range of mobile technologies such as laptops, smartphones, scanners, ATMs, healthcare devices, and point-of-sale devices. Mobility doesn’t just mean the devices themselves; it also includes provisioning devices, overseeing their operation, and securing them across their entire lifecycle, which is exactly why streamlined mobility management strategies are so vital.

Mobility is essential for keeping businesses connected, but as companies administer larger fleets with a maze of associated applications, the significance of managed mobility services (MMS) like Tangoe One Mobile becomes increasingly evident.

Learn more about Tangoe One Mobile, Tangoe’s Technology Expense Management solution for mobility services.

Cloud: Cloud computing refers to software and services that run on the internet versus locally on a computer. Key cloud technologies used by almost every business include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). These different kinds of cloud technologies can be managed with Tangoe One Cloud, our cloud expense management (CEM) solution. Gartner has stated that companies overspend on cloud by as much as 70%, and with the growing reliance on cloud applications among organizations, the use of a powerful CEM solution like Tangoe One Cloud is becoming a non-negotiable.

Learn more about Tangoe One Cloud, Tangoe’s Technology Expense Management solution for cloud services.

Technology Expense Management is essential for controlling technology spending, efficiently using services and resources, and strengthening IT budget performance. Here are some of the most common benefits of Tangoe’s Technology Expense Management solution, Tangoe One:

Centralized portal: Manage all technology expenses and IT assets in one centralized place with a single pane view over the broader optimization lifecycle, from pinpointing waste to tracking service contracts, invoices, expenses, anomalies, billing disputes, and the chargebacks necessary to allocate costs to any associated departments, projects, and users.

Actionable insights: Tangoe’s sweeping integrations observe and dissect all telecom, mobile, and cloud services, uncovering actionable insights about usage and costs that help set baselines, map costs to budgets, and forecast needs. Tangoe One goes even further to action these insights. For example, with Tangoe One Cloud for IaaS, the solution platform can act on its own cost savings intelligence and automate service modifications – achieving savings at speed and scale.

Tracking and visibility: Bring greater transparency and visibility across your organization by tracking and tracing exactly where spending goes in real-time. Tangoe’s solution helps you understand at granular levels who benefits from spending and how, who is responsible for spending, and how and why spending aligns or misaligns with financial budgets and forecasts.

Reporting and analytics: Better control your spending with modern reporting features and analytics that help you validate, forecast, and optimize your IT budget. Tangoe digs deep but also gives you a top-down view of what’s happening across your telecom, mobile, and cloud environments, with the ability to customize reports for different teams and departments.

No late fees: All customers have the option of utilizing Bill Pay, the smartest approach to invoice processing with Tangoe One. This option, which can be used with all our solutions (telecom, mobile and cloud), leverages automated workflows for extracting, approving, signing (checks), and mailing payments, ensuring every bill, both domestic and international, is paid on time across all vendor accounts and across 100+ currency types. You’ll eliminate late fees and misapplied payments, prevent disconnects, and restore efficiencies while maintaining complete control over approvals and release of funds.

Why should you trust Tangoe? With an ever-widening variety of Technology Expense Management solutions to choose from, Tangoe One cuts through the noise and drives over $340M in client savings each year. These solutions are also commonly referred to as IT Expense Management solutions, and our friends at ZK Research put together an IT Expense Management Buyer’s Guide & checklist to help you prioritize what you may need.

Here’s why more companies prefer Tangoe and how we deliver the best results:

Expertise you can trust: Tangoe pioneered technology expense management solutions more than 20 years ago, and today we’re the industry leader driving innovation through AI-powered automation, 65+ patents, and the largest ecosystem of global partners. Processing over 370K monthly invoices, managing 14M devices globally, and managing $15B in IT spend, our numbers speak for themselves.

Smartest AI-powered platform: Tangoe applies machine learning, behavioral analytics, predictive analytics, and hyper-automation to surface inefficiencies and savings at lightning speed, plus process efficiencies to streamline and improve financial management. As an example, our new AI engine even processes invoices in 8 seconds.

Global reach: Tangoe is a leader in global technology expense management services, helping global and multi-national companies save money and improve efficiency regardless of where they do business. We currently serve companies in 206 countries with services in 13+ languages, handling invoices in 129+ currencies and offering services hosted in both the U.S. and EMEA. For instance, Tangoe helped a multinational home improvement company build a global telecom expense management program.

Industry-leading ecosystem: No one comes close to our expansive ecosystem of 400+ integrations with carriers large and small, 550+ SaaS providers (plus support for an additional 225K other apps), CRM, ERP, IaaS companies and more for automating the management of technology expenses and inventories.

Unrivaled service: We take great pride in our award-winning quality of service (most recently winning a Gold Stevie Award in the “Best Technical Support Solution” category), as well as industry-leading SLAs.

Need more proof? Check out the results Tangoe has helped other organizations achieve:

Tangoe works with companies of all sizes around the globe from large enterprises down through the mid-market, including 50% of the Fortune 500. That’s because Tangoe One is a flexible solution and can be purpose-built for the specific needs of any organization. This will help you to avoid the pitfalls that come with a one-size-fits-all solution that isn’t capable of solving all your technology expense management needs. With the broadest choice and flexibility in cost management, Tangoe also offers a variety of managed services in addition to our software, which help supplement teams that struggle with the administrative and time-consuming work of expense management and inventory data hygiene. This ensures your DIY approach doesn’t kill your ROI.

Some of our managed services include:

  • Auditors to uncover all your technology assets, services, and benchmark your costs
  • Inventory management services to routinely update your library of assets and costs
  • Savings consultations to explore how much you’re spending in comparison to market-leading pricing and ensure all services are fully utilized without generating waste
  • Reconciliation services to validate all expenses as accurate (according to your contract)
  • Bill pay services to quickly route all invoices through approval processes and ensure they are paid correctly and on time, avoiding disconnections in service
  • Mobile device management services including global help desk and tech support

Technology Expense Management is a key — but separate — part of Technology Business Management (TBM). TBM is a broader discipline that improves business outcomes by enabling companies to consistently translate technology investments to business value. TBM solutions help CEOs and CIOs closely align business and IT strategies, driving value while cutting spend through IT cost reduction strategies and improving ROI.

Technology Expense Management is a critical step in this overarching approach, helping improve business outcomes through the effective management of technology expenses and IT assets across telecom, mobile, and cloud technologies.