The TEM Industry has emerged quickly through the fusion of Call Accounting, auditing and service bureau functionalities with web-based architectures.
While no definitive definition of just what TEM is has emerged, the market is maturing rapidly. Despite the current market fragmentation the trend lines suggest that an industry transformation is underway.
Unfortunately, the TEM industry is still in its adolescence. Most companies in the TEM space have only been around for five years or less and so and many have not reached a level of robust maturity demanded by the marketplace
TeleFirma is the nation’s only consulting firm devoted solely to assisting clients in TEM technology and reshaping their internal telecom business processes.
We know the TEM space very well and while we are not in the business of picking winners and losers, when the need arises, we can help our clients objectively find the right TEM solution for their environment in the shortest time possible and with a greatly accelerated ROI.
Our free, unbiased TEM Listing actually covers over 120 companies.
The Emerging TEM Marketplace
The TEM market has emerged quickly: it is a unique convergence of vendors with different histories. Many providers have evolved from the manual auditing organizations, telecom consultancies, or PBX management vendors. These firms often created software modules to help perform ongoing processing while delivering valuable reporting to their clients. Still others come from the Telcos themselves — teams of experts with years of internal billing experience. These individuals have launched start-ups to offer their knowledge of the Telco organizations’ processes and the billing systems failure points, in order to help resolve customer disputes quickly and cut overall costs. A third strain was the service bureau model which promised both prompt payment and domain expertise for the rather mundane task of process mountains of paper invoices.
In the last seven years or so, these different strains have converged. End-users finding themselves saddled with a variety of partial solutions began to demand portability and interoperability between various TEM appliances.
New entrepreneurs flush with venture capital jumped into the mix, while more seasoned companies began looking around for “partnerships” to close substantive gaps in service and products. Several firms that cut their teeth doing call accounting have moved into TEM applications and are now doing wireless management as well. TEM software companies content at one point to simply license the applications are now seeking outsource partners and are even empowering audit concerns with the automation necessary to do managed services.
As functional lines have blurred and the market has exploding with new firms, the enduser, still lacking domain expertise often finds itself bewildered by the options while also demanding broader and deeper expertise that most firms in the space can effectively deliver.
Make no mistake; the TEM industry does represent a great leap forward. But with so many players, there is considerable competition. And while that can create favorable price pressures, it can also mean a good bit product overselling and buying the hype without enough consideration for the internal transformation it might require.
While these products and services can be part of a rigorous program of managing telecom costs, we think it takes a bit more work to separate "fact from fiction, but also to make sure that the acquisition effort results in the type of success that customers are expecting.
