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Telecom Expense Management: Tangoe Profiled as Mobile Device Management Option

In IT there’s a lot of buzz about mobile device management, with issues of balancing security, cost, and flexibility for users.

Sorting through all the products is a daunting chore, but never fear -- industry observer Brian Reinholz gives you a good guide to one of the prominent vendors in the field.

Tangoe (News - Alert) is a telecom expense management company that entered the MDM space in January 2009, Reinholz writes, after completing the acquisition of Internoded: “Tangoe offers something fairly unique with these two offerings, letting a company integrate the benefits of TEM with MDM.”

"We're determining how the device is being provisioned, how it's going to connect to the environment, what policies are going to be on the device, and what applications if any are going to be on the device," said Julie Palen, senior vice president of MDM with Tangoe. "Then we manage the life cycle of that device both from a physical asset as well as a soft asset.”

The company offers a portal for users to sign up for a mobile device, which can be set to offer, as Reinholz notes, “a device that is most logical (in terms of cost and features) to that person's position in the company, geographical location, and needs.”

The system can make adjustments in real time -- let’s see your telecom expense management product do that. Let us guess -- your current TEM shows you, two months after the fact, which users were roaming and jacking up major fees. Really useful to know weeks after the fact, isn’t it? Guess what they’re doing now, find out in a couple months if you were right. Surprise.

TEM and MDM let you see such shenanigans the day they happen -- and not only that, Reinholz says, “Tangoe can make the appropriate calls to your carriers to get plans adjusted or disable features on a user's device to resolve the issue.”

Last month TMC’s (News - Alert) Anil Sharma wrote that Tangoe acquired Telwares’ (News - Alert) telecom expense management (TEM) practice, and formed a global strategic alliance with Telwares’ network and IT advisory business.

As per the terms of the pact, Tangoe will assume ownership of Telwares’ invoice management, call accounting and mobile device management operations.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Juliana Kenny