With today’s economic headwinds, IT leaders are being asked to make more efficient use of their IT budgets and technology assets. One study shows 83% of CIOs are under pressure to make their budgets stretch further than ever before. This has IT financial leaders thinking more about hiring an IT cost management consultant to minimize cloud costs, addressing technical debt, and making past investments serve the company’s needs for years to come.
IT spending advisories provide the confidence of data-driven decision making, purchasing backed by the latest pricing benchmarks, and support at key transition points. Here are the top use cases for bringing in the IT budgeting experts.
When to Engage in an IT Cost Management Consultation
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IT Spending Strategies: Understand the Effectiveness of Your Spend and How it Compares to Others
When technology changes rapidly, it’s hard to stay on top of the trends, much less service prices and new market disruptors. IT expense experts have the advantage of not just seeing how companies spend their IT budget, but actually managing that expenditure — making recommendations for cost optimization and acting on them to see how easy it is to carry out cost reduction projects. With decades of experience, they observe how the economy, new technologies, and new players in the market impact buying decisions. That means they can bring a mountain of intelligence for your strategic advantage. Here are some of Tangoe’s most common consultancies:
- Explore IT service market pricing benchmarks and see how your services compare
- Understand the effectiveness of your IT spend across the cloud, mobile, and telecom services
- Negotiate service provider contracts with the help of professionals
- Manage RFP processes to simplify due diligence for your team
- Conduct ROI analysis to ensure you’re getting the most out of your investments
- Identify opportunities to reduce operating costs but also make it easy to act on that insight
- Get advice on current technology solutions and digital transformation initiatives
- Define the strategy and plan for adopting emerging technology and execute it
Real Results: A $1B finance company needed a global IT services investment strategy. Tangoe’s consultants helped this customer identify and onboard the best vendors and services to meet their business needs in LATAM, APAC and NOAM regions.
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Discovery Services: Accurate Inventories Mean You Don’t Waste IT Resources
After the pandemic, technology investments ran wild, spurring panic-stricken purchases. But this has left companies with a surplus of services that now need to be dialed back for efficiency and cost-cutting purposes. Wrapping one’s arms around the entire corporate IT environment can be a job unto itself when you consider the work of inventorying each asset in the cloud, every service across the network, and the entire fleet of connected mobile devices – not to mention every account number, service type, and department, user, and invoice, associated with each.
Establishing the library of IT assets is foundational work at the heart of every cost management exercise, but it’s also known to be time-consuming and repetitive. This makes it a great opportunity for consultants and advisory services.
IT expense management companies, like Tangoe, have learned how to automate the discovery process, making it faster and easier to build a catalog of corporate services. Tangoe’s Discovery Service is designed to support all aspects of a discovery project in order to minimize impact on the client.
- Conduct historical audits to gain a comprehensive view of assets, services, and their associated costs
- Recommend ways to optimize the use of existing resources and reduce the cost or rates of both services and assets
- Get support at every step — discovery project management, service data collection, vendor interaction, and data analysis to identify savings opportunities
Real Results: A $43B medical device company wanted to identify savings while cleaning their inventory. In consultation with Tangoe’s expert advisors, the company’s inventory was backfilled and cleaned up. Tangoe added over 30 custom fields to better track their inventory and discovered $2.2M in potential savings.
A $17B pharma company need a holistic view of their inventory and the expertise to identify and authorize changes. Tangoe experts identified $1.1M in savings and provided the ongoing support to realize those savings.
A technology company with 8,000 employees needed to right-size their wireline network services. Tangoe advisor conducted an audit to optimize their fixed assets and identified 30% in potential savings from unnecessary features, services out of contract, services billing in closed locations and duplicate services.
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Price Optimizations: Know the Going Rate So You Can Get the Best Deal
IT expense consultants have their finger on the pulse of pricing, which makes it easy to compare prices and negotiate to get the best price possible. They know the going rate for IT services in near real-time, thanks to API integrations into hundreds of technology providers allowing access to their pricing sheets which are updated constantly.
This wealth of knowledge allows clients to get instant visibility into market pricing benchmarks for IT services and see how their spending compares. IT service pricing optimization can be a stand-alone service or a component of a larger project. For instance, you can:
- Explore IT service market pricing benchmarks and see how your services compare
- Pair pricing optimization services with broader discovery services aimed at auditing all IT services to identifying savings across the cloud, telecom, and mobile devices
- Pair pricing optimization services with a sourcing engagement, aimed at finding a new industry-leading provider in a specific category – cloud applications and infrastructure or telecom for example
- Ask advisory services to help your employees select the smartest telecom plan for their mobile devices – consultants have insight into the corporate usage trends and therefore can make intelligent recommendations to reduce costs
Real Results: A $35B manufacturing company needed assistance/expertise in sourcing their U.S. mobile contracts with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. Through direct contract negotiations, Tangoe was able to save the company $1.24M/year (19%).
An $11B retail client needed assistance in negotiating their Verizon Business agreement. Tangoe engaged in direct contract negotiations on the company’s behalf and delivered $1.4M/year in savings (25%).
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Shadow IT Discovery: Strengthen Cloud Security and Lower App Costs
The rapid growth of cloud computing has created a landscape where applications hide in the shadows, unknown to IT teams. Even when they’re known, SaaS licenses can go unused or outdated from a security perspective. Both situations create risk and inefficiencies for businesses that must be addressed.
Consultancies are ripe for this work. For instance, Tangoe’s Discovery Services targeted at cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications help companies gain a comprehensive assessment of the current cloud environment. Experts can also advise on the best ways to take control of the cloud, supporting both the creation and execution of Shadow IT action plans.
- Get a handle on Shadow IT, identifying all known and unknown applications in the IT environment
- Filter out unsafe apps while harnessing the efficiency of approved ones
- Put unified endpoint security programs into place to reduce the risk of cloud applications running on mobile devices
- Consolidate unnecessary applications, leveraging economies of scale and standardizing around enterprise-level tools
- Map all cloud infrastructure services, understanding who uses cloud assets, how they use them, how much each instance costs, and how to allocate cloud costs back to departments and lines of business
Get four more use cases for when to hire an IT cost management consultant