What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Revolutionizing Technology Expense Management: Tango's Insights on Cloud, FinOps, and AI-Driven Cost Strategies
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unlock the secrets to mastering technology expense management with insights from Chris of Tangoe, a veteran with 25 years in the field. Ever wondered how to control the escalating costs of IT and telecom in an age dominated by cloud and AI? We promise you'll gain practical strategies to navigate these challenges effectively. Explore how Tangoe has evolved into a leader in IT and cloud expense management, and learn about the importance of FinOps in optimizing cloud costs. Chris shares Tangoe's latest findings on managing cloud sprawl and the nuances of cloud contracts, emphasizing the critical role of a hybrid cloud strategy for performance and cost-effectiveness.
Get ready to rethink your corporate mobile device policies as we discuss the shifting dynamics away from BYOD. Discover why businesses are moving towards corporate liability policies to mitigate hidden costs and security risks. We also spotlight the transformative potential of satellite broadband, with players beyond Starlink stepping in to enhance connectivity in remote and disaster-prone areas by 2025. As companies grapple with the surge of SaaS apps and Gen AI tools, the need for AI-driven cost management becomes evident. Tune in to hear about the exciting growth opportunities in the FinOps community and how companies are preparing for the future, including quantum computing.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, fascinating chat today. As we know, costs are too darn high, and especially in telecom, and we're going to tackle that topic today with an industry innovator in telecom expense management. Finops is, of course, all the rage. Chris, how are you Doing?
Speaker 2:great, thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here, Really intrigued by you and your mission at Tango. Before that, maybe introduce yourself your role in the company and what's the big idea behind Tango helping businesses manage their technology expenses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. You know, Tango is, as you mentioned, telecom expense management. That's really our roots, right. We're one of the original pioneers in what's known as TEM. I always kind of say that the T's changed over the years. It's now technology or IT expense management, but our roots are in that. But overall, we've been providing services to customers, covering telecom. We've evolved into mobility and the full managed mobility services life cycle and, as you can imagine, with the growth of cloud, we now have offerings in cloud against infrastructure as a service as well as software as a service, and so we we support everything from asset management, driving innovation through automation of expense management and things like that. I think one of the exciting things about that is kind of our history, right. Whereas I mentioned, we're one of the pioneers and you know this is 2025. We're actually celebrating our 25th anniversary this year, so pretty amazing for, yeah, a tech company to be around after 25 years.
Speaker 1:Well it's been a challenge for enterprises for decades. Since your value proposition and in a modern IT environment, what are the biggest challenges when it comes to costs?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really everything around you know gaining visibility around their costs, around. You know, obviously, telecom expenses and the overages and the unexpected charges that come with that to underutilization and mobile, to then, as you can imagine, the growth of cloud. The cost of cloud keeps rising. We'll talk here around generative AI. While it's a transformative technology in the industry, it is leading to significant rises in expenses across the tech landscape for IT leaders and making their budgets challenging to support overall.
Speaker 1:Yeah, huge challenge and you actually to address that released your annual report on IT expense management trends savings recommendations. Give us a synopsis of the report and what were some of the key findings, insights, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think you think about Tango 25 years in the industry. We have a lot of experience. We've seen a lot in this. We have over $34 billion in IT spend under management, so from my perspective, that gives us a pretty unique position to understand that. We've seen what are the real drivers of IT costs, right, you know, from telecom to what I talked about on mobility around a lot of underutilization of mobility and different policies causing runaway expenses to you know all the different facets of cloud, right, whether it's infrastructure as a service and the different ways of consumption, to software as a service as well. So for us, it's looking at that across everything from mobile to cloud and telecom.
Speaker 2:And so the report itself is not high level right. It's packed with data insights across there. We're leveraging. We've got you know we're a software and a services company, right Very high touch experience. We provide customers. So we're not just providing them software to say, hey, here's your expenses, here's what you can do. We're actually helping with the recommendations, so a lot of those are packed into the report. We've got real world saving strategies that are in there as well to kind of help customers and IT leaders make smarter investments in 2025. And beyond.
Speaker 1:Oh, great proposition. So of course, everyone's moving to the cloud or has moved to the cloud, and most enterprises are multi-cloud actually. So you know, cloud sprawl has become a huge challenge. I mean, what are the sort of practical steps to optimize cloud spend, strategies and maintenance?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. I think, you touched on it earlier. I think one of the first things as an organization is getting a grasp on it in terms of getting the organizations together. We talked on FinOps, right, you know the inform, the optimize, the operate phases of that. You've got to really bring the organizations together from the Fin side of it, the financial side of it and the operation side of it to build a cloud cost optimization framework.
Speaker 1:You think about it.
Speaker 2:The companies have to get comfortable around measuring cloud ROI. Right, you've got to be able to understand what is that usage costing you. How do I allocate that back to the right projects or the team? What are the chargebacks that need to occur with that? That's that level of maturity they need to gain and I would say what's putting pressure on that is the increasing adoption of generative AI. Some studies that we've provided have shown that there was a 30% increase in cloud costs year over year due to generative AI. Right, leaving, you know IT leaders with you know a challenge of they have very little control over their IT expense when it comes to cloud. So they've really they've got to get in front of that. I think getting embracing FinOps is one of the first steps any company can take.
Speaker 1:Got it and, of course, the public cloud providers are battling each other, which is great for consumers of cloud, but you know it's still complicated. The contracts, the T's and C's, are complicated. They're looking to lock in customers, which has pros and cons. How do you see that playing out?
Speaker 2:Well, I think one of the first steps is, first and foremost, is finding where the workload should go right. Obviously, there's been this boom for many, many years of a cloud-first strategy or cloud-only strategy. I think people have dialed that back now to say I think it's more of a hybrid strategy and where is the best placement for the workload, both from a performance perspective, from a cost perspective and from an experience perspective? So one that gives more leverage in terms of how you're choosing the best hyperscale, versus just going all in and losing some of that leverage on that. We talk a lot around repatriation these days that's kind of a buzzy term out there and I think that is happening for the right workloads. It doesn't mean cloud. You know public cloud growth isn't out there but you've got to make sure you're choosing the right cost profile and the right performance profile for workloads.
Speaker 2:But all of that is leading to kind of the original point you mentioned is cloud inflation overall, I think we think is generally stabilized right. So you know the rising costs of generative AI. You know the public cloud providers wanting those workloads to go in their environments is putting more competition out there among the hyperscalers and I would say the maturity of all the hyperscalers is getting closer, you know, day after day, year after year. So it gives organizations a better opportunity to kind of secure better terms, but because they're informed on where the workloads are going, versus saying all the workloads are going here and then they lead to things we see where they have spend, that they have to consume because they're committed to it and maybe they don't have enough infrastructure to move there. So they have a better informed path going into those negotiations to lock in agreements, better terms, better pricing overall.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Let's switch to mobile. You know every organization is mobile first, mostly these days, and you know, luckily we're not in the days of minutes of buckets and usage and all of that craziness, but there's still a lot of waste. Where do you start there when it comes to a mobile budget?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think we talked a little bit earlier on this. Right is underutilization is in a broad category. I think is some of the low-hanging fruit. Right, it's a significant budget drain and I think a lot of it comes down to visibility. Right, companies have a lot of them, have a BYOD policy plus a corporate liable policy or strategy, and so they have a difficult time understanding what is the total mobile landscape. How many underutilized devices do I have? How many inactive lines should I have? Or, you know, onboarding, offboarding of employees. There's a lot of waste there. So the most immediate action, upfront when you look at this, is performing that comprehensive inventory and usage audit. They've got to identify those unused or unutilized devices, as I mentioned. You've got to deactivate those lines. They've got to repossess unneeded hardware. Again, that goes back to visibility into usage is absolutely critical in this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fascinating. So quite a bit controversially, you predicted the end of BYOD and its decline and I found that a little surprising. What's behind that? What's driving that shift?
Speaker 2:in our world overall, but the challenges we see and what we see from customers in their shift, is the hidden costs, the security vulnerabilities and some of the productivity losses of understanding everything around that for the IT teams overall. Because corporate liable in its nature provides greater control over the mobile security. It reduces something that's becoming more and more prevalent, which is cybersecurity risk on the device. The amount of corporate data sitting on devices these days is obviously at an all-time high, and so you can protect a lot of those costs in the long term. So, while BYOD is certainly a strategy that's still out there and is going to continue to exist, we see more and more companies moving to corporate liable policies because of the risks associated with the alternative. And just to give you kind of a quick perspective, the average cost of a data breach in 2024 was around, you know, just under $5 million. So you think about it. One of those occurs, unfortunately. That can far outweigh the investment you have to put into around providing corporate devices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's kind of shocking to hear. There's a big new X factor as well in communications technology and that's satellite broadband not just cellular but broadband access and not just Starlink, but new entrants in this space. What are your customers telling you about the role satellite might play in 2025 in their spending? We're seeing customers telling you about the role satellite might play in 2025 in their spending.
Speaker 2:Right, we're seeing more and more interest for it. You know the direct to sell is. You know that's expected to go mainstream, right? You know I think a lot of the advantages are, you know, obvious, right, you think about the natural disaster, the unfortunate natural disasters that have recently occurred. Those kinds of things are critical in those kinds of events. It can improve reliability. You know typical dead zone. But I think it has to apply to the right portions of the workforce. I don't think this is a wholesale swap out, because that's a significant investment, but for the right companies with the right workloads and right workforce, I think these giving much broader access to connectivity for certain types of situations. We're seeing more and more demand for that and obviously you're seeing the mobile device providers modernizing their hardware to support this more and more and you know, make that available and obviously more affordable across the board as well.
Speaker 1:So we're going to see it going to see it.
Speaker 2:I still think 2025 is a year of earlier adoption on that. You know, as device refreshes come through and more of the coverage and capabilities you know mature through the year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really interesting to watch and I guess the you know big point on emerging technologies so many new SaaS apps and Gen AI powered tools. My little business, my CFO, is always asking well, what's this for, what's that for? I probably got 10 different subscriptions at any given time. Any advice for managing through all of that and not getting out of control on AI spend and others merging technologies?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's funny AI has driven this boom and spend, but you really need AI to manage a lot of that cost. At the same time, you think about the data that comes down from any of the providers, whether it's a telecom, a mobile provider or especially in cloud, where you know the expense line item sheets and the downloads from the billing applications is just it's an insurmountable amount of data to manage. From the billing applications is just it's an insurmountable amount of data to manage. You have to take advantage of the AI-driven kind of cloud cost management tools that are out there. You know any tool that can ingest a ton of data and give you the optimization, the insights around it.
Speaker 2:You know, obviously, leveraging the best practices of FinOps embedded with that, with cost management tools, especially in cloud, is going to be key. So you know again I go back to proactive right. Being proactive around the management of that is key because if you get those costs under control then you can use that spend to go use it for innovation instead of just trying to keep your budget afloat overall. So you know, the Gen AI boom and the cost increases of that are where we're at right now and you've got to get those in line. But you know the Gen AI boom and the cost increases of that are where we're at right now and you've got to get those in line. But you know the next step is going to be something like quantum computing and that's going to have the potential to multiply costs even further. So again, it's all about the prep, the visibility, the proactive nature around it is where I think you have to go, and then having the right set of tools that can discover that and be a partner with you is a huge help too.
Speaker 2:Fantastic Well you have a busy year ahead of you.
Speaker 1:We're well into 2025. What are you excited about the next few months? Any travel or new initiatives you're deeply focused on.
Speaker 2:Really, you know, as we talked on it a bit, we've got a lot of things we're focused on continuing to increase our presence in the FinOps community. Becoming one of the premier providers and partners in there is one of the things we're very excited about there, and continuing to communicate within that ecosystem is probably an area we're most excited about in terms of the opportunity and growth in that side of the industry.
Speaker 1:Brilliant Well onwards and upwards or downwards in terms of cost. But yeah, congratulations on all the success and look forward to keeping in touch.
Speaker 2:Great. No, I enjoyed it very much. Thank you very much, Chris.
Speaker 1:And thanks everyone for listening and watching. Take care.