CLOUD EXPENSE MANAGEMENT

Gain visibility and control over your cloud expenses.
The Pay-As-You-Go concept of acquiring IT services in the cloud eliminates capital investment.
But the recurring costs require ongoing management, appropriate security and risk mitigation,
compliance monitoring and avoidance of cost inefficiencies and waste.

Increasing use of Cloud Services require a management solution

With the increasing adoption of cloud services by enterprises, a new domain of complexity has entered the ICT landscape. The challenges are similar to the ones that have existed in telecom and mobile management, which have been tackled by TEM for over two decades. Convergence offers its expertise in technology expense management to address those Cloud technology management challenges. CEM (Cloud Expense Management) provides  the visibility and control needed to manage Cloud services and expenses in order to contain ICT costs and optimize your cloud assets and services.


Manage your Cloud Expenses and Services

Organizations increasingly adopt the cloud to reduce spend on infrastructure or avoid high upfront capital expenses for new ICT investments. Unfortunately, the complexity of cloud pricing is something organizations struggle to understand. Successful Cloud adoption depends to a large extend on the maturity of cloud management and governance practices. With cost complexity continuing to increase alongside growing usage, users, accounts, and instance types, ICT professionals increasingly depend on tools to enable visibility, consistency, and scalability of management practices.

Cloud service providers must be carefully selected based on the needs of the business and the prices and services they provide.

Most organizations have not yet fully migrated all their applications to the cloud. This results in a hybrid cloud structure where public cloud services become an additional cost to the overall ICT budget. Understanding, planning, managing and optimizing these services therefore are extremely important.

Why Cloud Expense and Services Management ?

Cloud services are quite complex and as competition within the public cloud market intensifies, it becomes ever more complex to source and maintain the service purchases at an optimal cost. The know how of provisioning public cloud services is often insufficiently available within the organization.

Evaluating pricing models of each vendor can be confusing, as each vendor has different definitions of the same services they provide. There is no standard pricing amongst them, making comparisons nearly impossible when it comes to cost vs. service.

Many variables such as contract duration, SLA’s, commitments and availability may determine different price levels for the same services.

According to the RightScale State of the Cloud report, Cloud users underestimate the amount of wasted cloud spend at 30%, where the RightScale report has measured actual waste at 35%.

As a consequence, optimizing cloud costs is the top initiative again across all cloud users.

In addition to the price competition between cloud vendors, understanding business needs is important to fully take advantage of cost-saving opportunities.

The risk of overprovisioning is very high when purchasers are not knowledgeable of company needs, past and future usage trends and what projects are available and planned across the organization.

Organizations that lack proper monitoring systems and processes are at risk for overspending or waste in their public cloud services portfolio.

What are the challenges in Cloud Services Management?

Decentralized, self-service cloud services represent increasing and recurring cost in organizations and the OPEX costs (operational expenses) may quickly exceed CAPEX (capital expenses) and maintenance for similar services, resulting in an excessive TCO - Total Cost of Ownership of the required technologies and services. 

 

Read more/less

Distributed teams may set up their own cloud services, without the explicit consent of the organization or responsible ICT management. In addition, sensitive data may become at risk of breach, while compliance issues arise and huge cost inefficiencies become imminent.

Hence, organizations need to implement best practices to manage their cloud expenses and services by:

  • Gaining and maintaining complete insight in cloud costs with combined billing data from suppliers and detailed usage information.
  • Distributed to every part of the organization of standard and custom reports.
  • Allocation of cloud costs to the appropriate cost centers or departments.
  • Optimization from recommendations on cloud spend by reducing waste and overspend
  • Producing forecast data on future costs through predictive analytics

Managed Services enable Cloud Expense Management

Even with thorough planning, assessment and estimations of vendor’s costs and services, cloud cost management remains a challenge as ICT environments constantly change and grow. A technology expense management service provides the best way to keep track of cloud services usage and expenses and allows to continuously monitor them.

A cloud expense service consolidates your usage and cost data across multiple cloud vendors. The data it provides helps identify underutilized resources and reduce waste. It also provides the visibility needed to identify cost-saving opportunities. You will benefit from importing your invoice data and tagging it, turning those complicated and confusing bills into meaningful information.

With the understanding of cloud costs and your organization’s usage, it is much easier to forecast costs or plan your public cloud usage needs. To do this effectively, supplier payment models need to be understood and an expense management service is necessary, in order to minimize your costs and optimize your cloud services.

Cloud Expense and Services Management provide you with:

  • Visibility in usage and cost data from public and private clouds in a single unified dashboard
  • Analysis of costs by cloud account, team, or app, bringing understanding of usage trends
  • Chargeback functions by allocating costs to departments or business units
  • Automated recommendations that reduce costs
  • Savings suggestions, delivered to the right cloud users
  • Scoreboards that roll up progress on cost savings
  • Feedback to improve future recommendations
  • Data driven information allowing you to terminate or delete unused or idle resources
  • Optimization recommendations on AWS Reserved Instances and Google Committed Use Discounts
  • Forecast on future costs for prospective or existing cloud applications
  • Information for budgeting purposes
  • Alerts of overruns, sent to users or managers
  • Evaluation data regarding different clouds, instance types, and purchase options

 


Introducing TEM

The practice of TEM encompasses the business processes conducted by IT, procurement and finance departments to acquire provision and support corporate dispersed IT and Communications assets. The practice has evolved in recent years from Telecom Expense Management towards Technology Expense Management. Stated otherwise, technology expense management is the build-out of services, or the acquisitions of third-party services, to manage the supply chain for IT and telecommunications. 

TEM services enable enterprises' IT, procurement and finance departments to order, provision, support and manage costs of large-scale corporate communications, associated IT services and their inventories (such as fixed and mobile telephony and data, cloud license tracking, and loT connectivity). TEM services also include business intelligence and reporting suitable for supporting C-Level strategic decision making.

Technology Expense Management

Organizations are adding technology services and IT assets at an ever increasing pace. This makes it challenging for IT executives to ensure end-to-end visibility, optimize usage, and minimize inefficiencies. Everything from storage to computing and infrastructure is offered as a service, which limits IT’s control and visibility. The risk of increased  spend overruns, reduced profitability, and a significant impact on the bottom line are addressed by Technology Expense Management. TEM  helps drive visibility and control, optimizes inventory and ultimately reduces costs.

Cloud Expense Management

Cloud services such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS), together defined as XaaS promisse near-instant productivity and capacity. Organizations have however little visibility into or control over their cloud solutions’ true cost. Self-provisioning tools, often without IT’s knowledge may result in increases in productivity. But provisioned services may become redundant, contracts left unmanaged or unoptimized, and businesses may be unable to manage or audit the lifecycle and usage of these services. Enter Cloud Expense Management.

Telecom Expense Management

Telecom Expense Management is a mature practice for managing Telecom Expenses. Convergence is an European leader in providing the software and technology-based services that provide any size enterprise and not-for-profit organization as well as government with razor-sharp visibility, transparency and control of their organization-wide Fixed Voice, Mobile Voice and Mobile Data, Data Communications expenses, telecom infrastructure investments and telecom maintenance costs. 


Technology Expense Management provides in solutions that increase visibility, improve management and streamline control of enterprise-wide costs for connectivity, mobility, hardware, software and cloud services.

In most organizations, finance, IT, and Telecom support teams simply do not have the time, resources or the necessary experience and tools to effectively manage monthly technology expenses on an ongoing basis.

"CIOs and other technology managers face turbulent times where both economic and accounting challenges will drive the need to control costs, either as part of a sustained cost-reduction effort or to act as responsible financial stewards for digitally-drive businesses."

TEM Market Analyst

Our Experience

Convergence Analytics has over 15 years of experience in Telecom Expense Management. We executed over 250 projects with over 100 customers and achived a 99% success rate.  From a strong IT background, we use proprietary and third party software to consistently provide efficiencies and savings with Managed Services and Professional Services. We are serving large national and global customers and work with US, South American and Asian partners to support their global customers with our international experience across EMEA countries.

Our Philosophy

We love to use technology to create value for our customers and bring simplicity where complexity reigns. We bring clarity, control, compliance, and cost savings across our customer’s global technology expenditures. We leverage decades of experience in Data Management and Business Intelligence to provide data integration and expense reporting and even shadow billing solutions to help our customers get a grip on technology expenses. But we go the extra mile and provide technology enabled solutions that produce actionable savings. In our Business Consulting solutions we often work on a contingency basis, which assures our customers of guaranteed exceptional ROI results from their TEM initiatives. Through best practices, spend visibility and automation, we keep the digital footprint under control and cost-effective.


Convergence Analytics Solutions

Telecom Expense Management (TEM)

Telecom Expense Management Solutions enable companies to better plan telecommunications spend, source optimum contracts, ensure that they buy services against those contracts. In addition Telecom Expense Management monitors user and vendor compliance, provide telecom bill audit and accuracy, and analyze overall spend for ongoing improvements.

Mobile Services Management (MMS/MDM)

We take care of your Mobile Services Management. Our services dramatically reduce the amount of time your organization spends managing mobile services and devices. In addition to lowering your mobile expenses this service also lowers your operational expenses in managing the mobility lifecycle from sourcing to procurrement to device management to helpdesk.

TEM Audit & Recovery

Identify and recover billing errors and overcharges for your technology and telecom services as well as unnecessary services and excess rates. The scope of an audit engagement depends upon customer requirements. At a minimum, it consists of a detailed validation through shadow billing of both fixed and mobile services, equipment charges, taxes and surcharges.

TEM Strategic Advisory Services

The Convergence Advisory Services Consulting solution helps organizations to achieve substantial savings from Technology Expense Management solutions and processes. Convergence experts help your team to optimize expenses incurred from communications services, cloud infrastructure and subscription-based technology services. Sourcing is a key part of the service portfolio..

Cloud Management (CEM)

Cloud Expense Management has become the next frontier in managing Technology Expenses. Shadow IT and decentralized, self-service cloud services easuliy get out of control. Teams are setting up their own cloud services, bypassing the IT department and  organizational budget controls, while putting sensitive data at risk of breach, causing compliance risks and already lead to huge cost inefficiencies in most organisations.

IT Asset & Cost Management

Organizations are under pressure to keep track of actual IT costs and the business value of IT investments. Visibility into the cost of services is challenging and control difficult as financial data is scattered across the organization. IT Asset and Cost Management keeps track of the financial costs. It provides insight into what is being spent, and where and why costs are being incurred through analytics and reporting. 

Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT represents a new challenge in Technology Expense Management. It helps in process optimization, better production planning and control, supply chain restructuring, efficient asset utilization, product quality improvement, faster service delivery and customer service satisfaction. While it brings cost efficiencies, organizations need to track these costs and their impact through integration in TEM programs.

Application Development

Convergence offers a comprehensive portfolio of resources for development. Whether you want to augment your in house IT staff with experienced developers, assign a development project or outsource to our outsourcing service in SouthEastern Europe, we provide a solution. Our experts will work with you to gather requirements and help to plan, design, develop and implement a custom application that fits your needs. 


Find out how Convergence Analytics solutions can help you

Learn how Convergence Analytics can help you in your Technology Expense Management journey and start saving.

Get in touch now.



CONVERGENCE ANALYTICS

Antwerp (Borsbeek), Belgium
Belgrado (Novi Beograd), Serbia

AGENCIES

Paris, France
Dusseldorf, Germany
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lissabon, Portugal
Madrid, Spain

WE HELP


CIO - Financial Managers
CPO - Procurement Managers
CTO - Technology Managers
Mobile Managers
Network Managers
Accounts Payable Managers


TECHNOLOGY SERVICES


- Telecom Expense Management

  • Historic Audits
  • Contract Negotiations
  • Telecom Procurement

- Mobility Management

  • Bring your own device

- Cloud Management Services

  • Cloud Cost Optimization
  • Cloud Billing
  • Cloud Analytics


CUSTOMERS


Healthcare
Manufacturing
Media
Services
Case Studies

WORK WITH US


Careers
Partners

WHY CONVERGENCE


About Us
- Services
- Technology

CONTACT US


EMEA
Belgium:
Tel: +32 (0)3 270 94 40
GSM: +32 (0)475 23 43 04

CEE
Serbia:
Tel: +381 (0)11 441 45 00
GSM: +381 (0)62 475233

 


MAIL US

Send Us a Message


© 2019 Convergence Analytics, All Rights Reserved