By Doug Allen

TEM veteran Telesoft has released the latest version of its Telesoft TEM solution. The Telesoft 10.0 TEM tool incorporates a number of improvements over its core functionality to deliver greater enterprise visibility and management control for both fixed and wireless telecom expenses. The enhancements focus on reducing inappropriate telecom spending by providing customers with more actionable, service- and user-specific tracking of all telecom outlays across the board.

While Telesoft is currently a direct-sales only company, company president Kevin Donoghue says thats about to change in the very near future; in fact, the company is hard at work putting together a partner program and is looking at distributor deals, although nothing has been finalized yet. But he feels release 10.0 is the most channel-friendly version yet, offering easier installation, and a relatively quick learning curve for users and partners alike.

The main attraction of 10.0 is a new Web interface that allows customers to view, save, send and retrieve wizard-based reports on mobile usage and order management to help IT managers establish more effective automated control of their wireless services, which are typically hard to track and control on a per-user basis. With greater visibility into mobile usage, ordering, and user behavior, customers can establish better policies and guidelines for mobile device usage while reducing costs by identifying the source of inappropriate expenditures. Reports can break down usage on an individual, departmental, or company-wide basis, by provider, type of service, level of usage, or for particular customer divisions such as telecom, IT, finance or management.

Telesoft has also spent considerable time overhauling their user interface to make it more user-friendly. Addressing nagging customer requests for more flexible reporting, the new interface exposes more data fields and provides more query/report options, making it easier to mine data quickly.

Telesofts Donoghue says these kinds of solutions can typically save customers 10 to 20 percent of their annual telecom spend, a range typically in line with most analyst figures, which can translate to big bucks for the medium-to-large enterprise customers that form Telesofts target market. Thierry Zerbib, CEO of Telesoft, however, ups that number to about 35 percent, given the tools ability to integrate both fixed and wireless telecom expense reports. Part of that leap is likely attributable to the spiraling costs of wireless usage; the company cites analyst reports of mobile growth rates of 30 percent or more per year, driving 80 percent of enterprises to overspend on these services by an average of 15 percent.

Moreover, the reports provide more actionable data that can be more easily broken down to help customers not only craft more efficient mobile policies, but improve their mobile ordering technology processes as well. The latest release can enforce these mobile policies and simplify ordering or changing access privileges, even for multiple providers, through a single interface for administrators, managers or employees. The tool also enables administrators to make moves, adds, and changes relatively quickly as tactical business requirements change.

Large enterprises struggle not only to enforce mobile policies to reduce telecom costs but also to optimize spending across all carriers in their markets, said Eric Goodness, research vice president at Gartner. Given the growth in mobile spend globally, Gartner is seeing customers look for vendors that can help them avoid costs through the use of fixed and mobile TEM solutions.