Telecom Is Quietly Draining Your IT Budget. Here’s How to Fix It with Socium IT’s Stephen Hancock

If telecom sits underneath everything in your business but rarely gets attention, this episode pulls back the curtain on why that invisibility is exactly where cost, inefficiency, and risk quietly accumulate.

In this conversation, Tonya sits down with Stephen Hancock, founder and president of Socium IT, to unpack why telecom is one of the most overlooked (and under-optimized) layers inside IT. They explore how unmanaged vendor ecosystems, lack of visibility, and outdated documentation create compounding inefficiencies and why most organizations don’t realize the scale of the problem until they audit it. 

Stephen shares how telecom has quietly evolved into a utility—critical, but often ignored—and why treating it that way without operational discipline leads to wasted spend, lost time, and missed strategic opportunities. From invoice complexity to contract sprawl, this conversation reframes telecom as a lever for both cost recovery and organizational leverage. 

He also breaks down how AI is reshaping vendor evaluation and telecom management, where it creates leverage (and where it creates risk), and why the future of IT leadership requires both financial clarity and operational ownership across the full lifecycle. This episode offers a practical lens on how to reclaim control, reduce noise, and redirect resources toward higher-value initiatives like AI, security, and innovation. 

In this episode, they explore:

• Why telecom is one of the least visible, but most impactful, layers in IT 
• How small operational tasks quietly compound into major time and cost drains 
• Where organizations lose the most money (and time) in telecom management 
• The hidden risks of invoice complexity, billing errors, and contract auto-renewals 
• Why lack of inventory and documentation creates ongoing inefficiency 
• How telecom overspend often happens without anyone noticing 
• The concept of telecom as a “utility” and what that means for IT strategy 
• How AI is changing vendor evaluation and where it can create overconfidence 
• Why advisory alone is no longer enough without execution and lifecycle ownership 
• The disconnect between tools, data, and true operational accountability 
• How IT leaders can align more effectively with CFOs using financial clarity 
• The importance of establishing a clean baseline before making technology decisions 
• Where leaders should reinvest reclaimed time and budget (AI, security, innovation) 
• The single highest-leverage step IT leaders can take right now: building inventory visibility

Important Links:

https://app.technologymatch.com/solutions/telecom-contract-negotiation-rate-benchmarking

https://app.technologymatch.com/solutions/telecom-cost-optimization-for-multi-location-enterprises

https://app.technologymatch.com/solutions/telecom-expense-management-1

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome to Between Fires and Futures, a podcast about the real work of tech leadership, managing today's chaos while building tomorrow's business. I'm Tanya Chirrell, a three-time founder with two successful exits, and the founder and CEO of TechnologyMatch.com. Each week, in this podcast, I talk with the leaders doing the real work, solving for now, building for what's next, and leading through pressure, not perfection. This is the podcast for tech leaders fighting fires today and daring to build the future anyway. Welcome back to Between Fires and Futures. I'm your host, Tanya Terrell, and today we're looking at one of the most overlooked drivers of cost, complexity, and control inside the IT organization, telecom. It sits underneath everything, every application, every location, every user experience. And when it's not managed with discipline, the impact shows up everywhere. It's in your budget, in your operations, and in your ability to move fast. And most IT leaders don't realize how much inefficiency is sitting inside their telecom environment until they take a closer look. So today we're breaking down where telecom costs quietly compound, why traditional vendor management leaves gaps, and what it actually takes to bring visibility, control, and accountability back into this layer of the business. Because when you get this right, it doesn't just reduce cost, it creates leverage. My guest today is Stephen Hancock, founder and president of Socium IT. Stephen built Socium to bridge the gap between high-level advisory and real execution. His team works directly with enterprise IT leaders to model financial outcomes, manage vendor ecosystems, and take ownership of telecom across the full life cycle. Under his leadership, Socium has helped organizations reclaim over$25 million in savings while managing millions in monthly telco expenses across complex multi-location environments. Steven, welcome to Between Fires and Futures. I'm so glad you're here today.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about telecom, an overlooked aspect of the technology budget.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

Yes, but impacts everything, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Definitely.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

So right now, IT leaders are navigating what we're seeing is tighter budgets, faster tech cycles, and just more noise, especially from AI, than really ever before. What are you seeing on your end?

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yeah, I think we're seeing similar, similar things are flat or down, and the environment just keeps getting harder. So more providers, more SaaS, more cloud, and like you mentioned, AI on top of all of that. And honestly, as I was thinking about this, I think this happens every few years with technology. A new paradigm shift comes in. It was cloud and then with security and then it was AI. There's always a wave that forces IT leaders to kind of rethink how they're allocating resources. So budgets really are forcing this kind of consolidation. And now the complexity has outpaced the headcount. So what we're seeing is leaders getting really honest about what makes their beer taste better, what's core to their everyday goal of helping serve the organization more effectively and what's not. So they're bringing in advisors for strategic decision making, like where to invest and where to consolidate and how to sequence those things so that it more effectively drives their technology goals. And then outsourcing the operational work that doesn't really differentiate their business, which so I don't think there's any magic bullet on how IT leaders are managing these changing budgets and these ever-changing technology cycles. But there's like it seems to us that there's a clear pattern that the leaders who are getting ahead of this kind of these changes and this ever-present technology shifts that are going on are the ones that are understanding what they're trying to accomplish, what makes their beer taste better. And they're not doing everything in-house. They're bringing in outside people to help with them help with some of these operational tasks that aren't necessarily core to their business.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

Yeah. I think it really feels like they're in this interesting squeeze right now, where on the one side, boards and executive leadership are asking about AI and transformation. And then on the other side, finance is asking for cost discipline and ROI. So it's almost like there's this huge innovation pressure, which is rising at the same exact moment that that financial scrutiny is rising. So how is an IT leader to navigate that? Yeah, that's more annoyed than ever before, too, all at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 4:37

Yeah, I think that the they're losing a lot of time in doing basic, trying to like keep basic things in-house. Like we see one of the biggest time wasters that I think a lot of our clients are dealing with is just provider management. It sounds really simple, but this kind of the simple things compound fast. And when you extrapolate all these like small tasks that IT leaders and their teams have to accomplish, um, you're sitting on weekly calls with your providers, you're escalating service delivery issues that should have been resolved two weeks ago, you're placing a change order, clarifying an IP address, chasing down a disconnect order that never went through, reconciling an invoice that AP kicked back because it was outside of variance. Individually, these are low-value tasks. But you know, if you take each of them and say they take five minutes each, a couple of them happen a week, a couple of them happen a month. You're taking your best people off of really core business tasks, like understanding how to adopt the next transformational AI solution or adopting that new cloud solution that's going to help you beat a competitor in the market. That operational stuff compounds and takes your team away from those strategic initiatives and investments that you want to make. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

So makes sense. And I read this interesting stat kind of getting prepped this interview. And that is that Gartner reports that telecom and network spend is often one of the least optimized in all of the IT cost categories, and that many enterprises operate with up to like 30% inefficiency in telecom and network services due to contract sprawl and unused capacity and all of that. So sort of taking that on board, and what you just said about the time that is used so inefficiently managing all of this. Where are IT leaders losing the most time and cost inside telecom and management today?

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Yeah, I think the carrier management piece that I mentioned just a second ago, I think definitely I think Gartner's statistic is on point. I think that there's a lot of lack of visibility in telecom. So carrier management, like I described, with your taking your team away from some of those core tasks, but another piece is invoice management. That compounds in time and real bottom line dollars. So billing errors and rate changes and auto renewals and things like that, they force your team to really dig in and understand your contracts, your monthly services, and that really takes away from time. That's that is a money problem. I think the time problem is the lack of documentation. I think maybe that is the root of things, is that when you don't have visibility into what you're doing and what you're and you're sort of like making sure that you have all the services documented, you really spend a lot of time triaging requests when they come in and and then having to route them appropriately to the right team member. It's uh I think it's carrier management and invoice management that are two of the biggest time drivers of the teams and how you allocate those resources.

SPEAKER_02 7:40

Yeah, those invoices are notoriously complex. I mean, we've heard from leaders who say the invoice review alone it costs hours monthly. It's a monthly grind. It's not strategic, but it's just necessary. So that's something that we definitely hear all the time.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yeah, it's uh it we're seeing a lot of it, and a lot of people hate it. It's it's one of the least favorite tasks of a lot of IT teams. And it's definitely a mix of people that help and support the analysis. And some of the tasks lay within AP, but they're not technical enough to understand some of the or finance in general, and they're not technical enough to understand how telecom works. Traditional network engineers and network architects are not financial, not they're not financially savvy enough to understand how some of these things work. So we're I think that Socium and Vigilis drows a good line of helping helping bring uniformity to between the technical and financial side of IT, telecom to really help bridge the gap, which really that documentation and that the our ability to bridge the gap is I think what helps close the gap and helps people save time, helps people bring back that time that they spent hours a month analyzing their invoices and to your statistic about Gartner, operationalizing some of the findings that they have, they can they can see operationalizing some of those into cost savings or into strategic investments are all those that's the catalyst for recognition of some of those issues that you have within your organization.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah, I in a little bit I'd like to walk through like how Socium helps clients with that. First, I want to get into you know the another ben another study that I saw, some research showed that, and I can't remember where I read this now, but industry benchmarks show five to twenty percent telecom overspend simply due to lack of auditing, which is just shocking. 20%. That's massive. So, what actually happens when telecom runs on autopilot without auditing or real inspection?

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Yeah, we see I see this in two areas. Yeah, I see this in two areas. So when I talk to clients, I say that the telecom expense management and just routinely auditing your invoices, that lets you recapture anywhere from three to ten percent. There's usually a stray service that you know that bills above its contracted rate, a change order that allows a service to double bill and you don't catch it. So you sometimes we don't see like tremendous cost savings and budget return from invoice auditing. What we do see tremendous gains is in like at the end of a contract right sizing. And that again goes back to my point about documentation. When you let telecom run on autopilot, there's I always like to make this joke that like at best our clients have a spreadsheet from four years ago that nobody's maintained, but most of the time they have nothing, no documentation.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Um, so you see like our organizations are paying for services that they decommissioned or for locations that they've closed. Nobody's checking and nobody's catching. And the carriers, providers, they're not going to give you your money back just because you didn't audit it. So contracts auto-renew at above the market rates because nobody flagged the renewal window. So over time, telecoms becomes this like financial and operational obelisk that uh that really a lot of people have trouble understanding. And when they don't, there's no documentation, there's no ability to inspect what is out there. And a lot of people will take the 5% reduction that you get at the renewal time when you don't go out to the market and write size every couple of years. I always equate this to changing jobs versus staying at your existing company. Your existing company is going to give you a cost of living raise every couple of years and then maybe a bigger raise once every 10 years or so. Whereas people the job hop, they get 20% increases every couple of years when they change jobs. I'm not advocating for that. Right. You know, that's the reality.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

And so ultimately changing carriers is where we see the biggest, the biggest sort of like return to your bottom line from a budget standpoint. You'd really make a lot of savings and at least going out to the market and doing that request for quote keeps your existing carrier honest.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. And that really is a good analogy because I think we can all understand that one. How do you think AI is changing the way IT leaders approach vendor evaluation and decision making now?

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Yeah, that's that's a real challenge. And it was kind of one of the reasons that led me to the creation of Vigilis, but I think AI is really commoditizing the advisory side of businesses. So, like the a lot of advisors out there used to do a lot of business consulting and helping providers, helping our their clients choose technologies. And while we're still seeing clients that are interested in that process, but they want like structure, they want methodology, and they want experience behind recommendations. But AI has really allowed customers to be more informed than ever. Like we all talked about the past couple of years, buyers have become way more informed. Yeah. They can go to choose your open, choose your LLM, choose your AI platform, and they can have their entire the market quantified in a very short amount of time. And I think we have to be honest about the fact that we have to produce better processes and better structure to our engagements if we're going to keep helping our clients with the consulting side of the business. But where AI has really changed things for us is inside Vigilis. So Vigilis is our telecom expense management or technology lifecycle management platform. And that like AI has allowed us to incorporate features that are typically reserved for huge platforms that have tons of data analysts, like pattern recognition at scale, comparing thousands of line items against their contracted rates every billing cycle and flagging anomalies and catching the stuff that human analysts would miss on page 47 of an invoice. So it's moved us from doing periodic, like quarterly audits to really continuous intelligence of our clients' services. So I think that old model of doing an engagement every 20 months or so on your telecom bills is not going to be a fruitful venture much longer. I think that the data is moving too fast and the technology is moving too fast. So, really, AI has allowed us to drive technology that's paired with our people and our platform and our process who understand carrier behavior and who understand contract language and the negotiation dynamics to help really provide a holistic capability and holistic management of telecom and allowed us to adopt that and bring it to market really quickly.

SPEAKER_02 14:19

Yeah, amazing. Yeah. So what led you to build this platform around telecom intelligence? And yeah, can you like expand upon it a little bit more? I'd love to learn just a little bit more about that and we'll get more into what Socium does as well.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

Yeah, sure. So it it hit me about a year and a half ago. I was working with an existing client and they mentioned they were going to be looking for a new MSP. Um, so um naturally I asked if I could help support that evaluation. And when I was talking with the leader, he said that he'd already put together the RFP, he'd already created the scoring matrix, he had already built out the financial calculations, and AI had already suggested five providers that that he could work with. So that was a huge wake-up moment that a lot of the stuff that I'd been doing for the past 10 years, he had done and created in the matter of a weekend. Right. So we still provide those advisory services to our clients, but I think that, like I mentioned, they value the process and the structure versus the experience. So the platform really came about to help bring in a new engagement point for our clients and to really provide like holistic value around their entire life cycle. Because I think that typically technology lifecycle management is reserved for the largest companies out there that have super complex environments. If you have 10,000 circuits or 10,000 endpoints on a voice agreement, then you really need really detailed daily management of those of those services. Whereas an organization with 20, 20 locations, they could have gone by in the past with a little bit less work. But again, to my earlier point, they missed stuff. So we really wanted to try and bring some of those enterprise grade features down to the medium enterprise market, where typically a thousand-person to two thousand person company wouldn't necessarily adopt an outsource management of their technology environment. But just because we have so much automation built in, because we have so much, so many capabilities around automating the analysis of things, and we're doing a lot of outsourcing of some of those commodity tasks that I mentioned earlier. We're bringing this, we built this platform to really help support those companies that want to outsource that work and do the things that make their beer taste better.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

Yeah. Yeah. And definitely we, I feel like the writing's really been on the wall the last, I don't know, five plus years around this. It just feels like advisory alone is getting compressed. And of course, in the early stages of that, AI's given leaders leverage in the early stages, they can generate RFPs faster, compare vendors, like all the things that you is summarize those proposals, all the things that you talked about. But at least in my experience, I'm curious. It makes me wonder if it creates overconfidence. Because I've certainly got feedback back from AI that because I've just been in this space so long, I know to question it. And I think at the end of the day, AI can't really see contract nuance and it can't feel operational friction. So I wonder like how much of that plays into people kind of using AI on their own and feeling overconfident. And how does your platform address that concern?

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Yeah, I think there that's maybe two, I would say see that as two separate areas. On the advisory side, we see the I think that the prompt or the uh the output is only as good as the prompt that you give AI. So you can ask it to generate an RFP for you all day long. But you know, well, what I always tell my clients about running an RFP is that if you just give somebody a checkbox and they're gonna check it, and you don't know how complicated that the answer behind the checkbox is.

SPEAKER_02 18:04

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Um so that's that I definitely think that makes people a little overconfident because there is some level of experience that goes into really understanding. Like I think I was talking this morning with a with a provider, and clients don't know what they don't know. So if you if they don't know there's that a new technology out there or they don't know that there's a fundamentally different way to do something, and they don't prompt the AI to help them understand that fundamentally different way, they AI won't return it. AI will just answer the question in the most efficient way possible. So there's definitely people out there that are finding ways to use AI to drive those kinds of results within their business, but I think a lot of times I think there's just like there's something to be said for the structure that we put into our advisory, the advisory side of our business. Yeah. That that helps people feel more confident in the outputs of it. So, and then if you're talking about maybe how AI and how Tem has fundamentally or how AI has allowed us to fundamentally change Tem, I think that we're building faster than than a lot of our competitors are. We're building faster, we're releasing features faster, and we're doing it in a different, a totally different way than our some of our providers are doing it. So I think that that's allowed us to um that's allowed us to provide unique solutions to our customers and then provide people where I think the most important friction points are versus providing people everywhere. Providing people everywhere is inefficient. We want to provide people and provide process uh on the telecom expense management side where we see the biggest friction points that's gonna allow our clients to like take a lot of additional tasks off their plate.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Yeah, it makes sense. Tell me a little bit more about what makes Socium's approach fundamentally different from other solutions that automate maybe one slice of the life cycle.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Yeah, so a lot of Tem Tools were built in a slightly different telecom environment. So developed Socium developed Vigilis in the age of AI. So Vigilus is our expense management product, and it's our own clients get their own portal, their own login, and the these AI capabilities are built into the entire platform from day one. And I know before people come out here and say that's not our only hook, it is a good hook, AI, but I think that the AI is a main differentiator. But the other piece is proactivity. I think that like from in my experience, a lot of the tools out there require somebody at your company to become an expert in expense management and really require somebody in your within your company to be the operator of the platform. So the way we see it is I don't want to just transfer work from like the client dealing with it or the client dealing it with themselves from the client dealing with it to the expense management provider. I want to holistically own that process. And I want to holistically transfer work from our clients to us, which this whole time we've been talking about low-value tasks and how leaders are taking those low-value tasks and transferring them to external, transferring them externally to help more focus more on their critical business initiatives. So we build a runbook for our clients, we learn their environment, their carriers, their contracts, their escalation paths, and then we become an extension of their team. And so we don't just handle some of these tasks and then dump them back on their plate. We think about understanding their environment and then we proactively manage some of these things. I think one of the biggest differentiators is that we include project management for new services in our into our platform. So that allows us to be in front of a lot of things that a lot of traditional carriers are behind on. We cover that full life cycle. So we start with a consulting side of things. And if we if we want to right size, we want to clean things up, we come in with a clean inventory, we help them with invoicing, we help them with contract reconciliation, variance detection, and then financial reporting. We wrap a strategic lens and proactive lens around all of that to help them execute it. So that they're not just dumped with tasks back on their plate. We try and help them. We develop the platform. They have visibility into it. They have a login, but really that should just be their system of record for them to be able to review things. And it's our team is accountable for the outcomes.

SPEAKER_02 22:15

Yeah. No, I love this. I love, well, I first of all, I love this. You've got deep domain expertise on the advisory side. So it the technology comes along and now you're able to leverage it to take what you already had mastered, and now you're able to leverage that across AI and across the life cycle. So I I love that. And one of the things that we see a lot on our end, because we're talking to IT leaders day in and day out, we're surveying them all the time. And one of their biggest pain points is that there is a tool for everything. There's a service for everything. There's benchmarking tools, invoicing tools, contract tools, services that can help with that, but no real connective tissue. And if no one owns the full life cycle, then things fall between the cracks. There's no ownership. So I love what you're saying here is that there is now ownership end to end. And so what changes when someone owns it end-to-end? Because it's one thing to benchmark a rate. It's a whole other thing to manage the contract through its entire life.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Yeah, that's I keep trying to lean into the feedback that we get from customers, and it's we don't want to manage that. We don't want to manage that. We don't want to manage that. But I think that the helping our clients with taking another task off their plate, helping them with translating, we anticipate something is going to come up. We anticipate that there's a new service that's going to be delivered. So we project manage it to completion. We ensure that the GL codes and cost centers are properly allocated. We ensure the technical information is in there. We ensure the contract end data is in there so that who would have done that handoff but would have been a network engineer to who? Um it's typically one person that's responsible for everything. And andor there's maybe a few handoffs in there. And without like a centralized database and with automated workflows, some of those tasks get lost. We've talked a little bit about uh contract contract renewals automatically happening because nobody proactively documented the contract end date for something.

SPEAKER_02 24:20

So it's it it definitely is we got sucked into another year.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Yeah, it's uh it's the the the lack of visibility and lack of documentation is the biggest thing. So that if everybody's singing off the same sheet of music, at least you you see that information. And then if you have somebody that's helping with the blocking and tackling and helping with drawing up the X's and O's, not only with the tactical management post-sale, but also we bring the consulting side into helping our leaders evaluate this financial clarity. We anticipate what they want to do with their services next. Like we have a client that their services are coming up for renewal later this year. We've identified that. We've already we're already engaging with them on conversations about all right, here's what you've given, here's this the NPS rating that you've given this provider over the last three quarters. It seems to be improving. Their price is a little bit higher. Do you want to make the switch out? We're talking through all these data points that we're gathering throughout the process and we're bringing them a real sort of like a real recommendation, a real understanding of the baseline versus just bringing them pieces of the puzzle.

SPEAKER_02 25:21

Yeah. No, makes sense. And another thing that we are hearing increasingly more of is that like CIOs are they have to be financial translators too. They're not just technologists anymore. And aligning with the CFO is now a top priority in CIO, CFO partnerships. So you touched on this a little bit, but I'd like to go a little bit deeper. Um because we are seeing tightening budgets or certainly having to defend ROI and where these budgets are going. So in in this sort of tightening market, how do you help leaders evaluate initiatives with financial clarity instead of guesswork? And how do you support that CFO alignment?

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Yeah, that's uh that's a really good question because you mentioned something just a second ago that there's a tool for that. There's a tool for that, there's a tool for that for contracts, for invoices, for this. So I guess I feel like the biggest problem isn't the lack of data. The data is everywhere. We're inundated with data as uh as organizations these days, especially IT. I think it's just lack of a clean baseline and then lack of their time to translate that baseline into something that's meaningful. Um, so I don't think that a lot of enterprises can tell you with confidence, but like break down everything, all their services, unit perspective, what rates, what locations. So, you know, the business case that is waiting to be built is creating that baseline and then taking into account things like the ancillary benefits of solutions. How much time is this going to save you? What kind of FTE reallocation are you gonna be able to do with this? So, whether it's an SD-WAN migration or carrier consolidation or UCAS rollout, you need to compare your options using the real economics that you have with that baseline, and then understand, compare like for like apples to apples, how other providers meet those needs. And oftentimes that's not a very easy thing to do. There's like a lot of noise in the industry, a lot of providers that have different cost models. So we help rationalize their that baseline data into what is what is the next thing that this that we can do as an organization to adopt new technology, lower our costs, integrate a new service into our line, or return budget to take advantage of a new initiative. So the the I think the leaders have a lot of data, but they need data that's driving actionable decisions and not just like not just data for data's sake.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Right. Right. So if we sort of zoom out and look practically at IT leaders, let's just say in our audience, what are some steps that they can take right now to begin to get their arms around it?

SPEAKER_00 28:03

That's a struggle. I mean, I think that establishing a system of record for data is imperative, whether it's something you have internally today, or I hate to say just do a spreadsheet, but that's like the easiest way that you can just task somebody with like, let's do clean documentation from day one, or uh let's use a system that we already have internally to adopt to adopt and integrate some of these capabilities. Let's start to bring in contract terms, let's start to bring in SLA terms, let's start to bring in invoicing periods and try and identify and ensure that we have all the data that we need to make decisions. I think the easy button is to just call Steven and adopt Vigilis, but but uh there's tons of tools out there that that help you clean up data and create this baseline. And then you have to maintain it. So there's definite challenges with doing it internally, but I think that the biggest recommendation that I would have is if you're coming up on a procurement, you're coming up on a lifecycle, you really need to understand baseline so that you can accurately understand what you're comparing against. A lot of times people walk into a procurement decision without without properly understanding what they have, what they're using, why they're using it. And that lack of baseline understanding creates problems when you go to market for a new solution.

SPEAKER_02 29:17

Yeah. Yeah, that makes complete sense. When we spoke in preparation for this show, you described telecom becoming more like a utility. So I wanted to dive into that. I thought that was an interesting thing that you said. And I want to better understand what do you mean by that and what does that mean for the future of telecom?

SPEAKER_00 29:38

Yeah, this is one of my favorite, favorite analogies that telecom is becoming more and more of a utility. It's like uh it's like plumbing. You turn on a faucet and you expect it to work. You expect the water to come out of the faucet. There's a lot that goes into plumbing. Someone's maintaining the pipes, monitoring the pressure, and making sure their water quality is good. So the a lot of the business doesn't understand how complex telecom is, and they don't think about anything until something breaks. So telecom is the exact same way. And I don't think that for some businesses it may be a core business value or core task or a business valuable task, but most organizations just want the network to stay up, they want the bills to be accurate, and they want the contracts to reflect what they're paying for. So the pipes being in the walls and telecom being kind of like an invisible, invisible aspect of your engagements, of your business operations, makes it so that IT leaders can't can't effectively articulate how this uh this service supports the business. So we we're trying to we're trying to help our clients with taking advantage of that this is a utility and we see it as a utility. We see it as something that not is not necessarily a strategic investment for us, and that they want to maintain the pipes without necessarily bringing the like plumbing, becoming an expert plumber, a master plumber. They want to they want somebody to maintain the pipes, to do the the check their water quality and to check the pressure. But you know, there's obviously some capabilities that providers are gonna meet or that clients are gonna maintain in-house, but the more services or the more capabilities, the more tasks you can outsource of a utility, when it becomes a repeatable task, it's easy for us to take it on. It's easy for you to outsource it, it's easy for you to reclaim that time.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

Yeah. Yeah. No, I the plumbing analogy is great and it really helps me understand it because I did want to dig into that. Because I when something becomes a utility, it stops demanding attention until it breaks, of course. But it just works, right? We expect it all to just work, and that's powerful. And what you're talking about is taking the that cognitive load off the business, off the leaders of the business.

SPEAKER_00 31:47

Yeah. And they I'm sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

No, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

I was gonna say, yeah, they they don't see and they don't expect inspect it regularly. So, like you say, taking the cognitive load off of the regular inspection of things to make sure that the plumbing's running right is sort of like what the processes that we're creating and the technology that we're using to support the those tasks.

SPEAKER_02 32:06

Yeah, they have plenty of other things to worry about anyway. So if telecom becomes frictionless and fully visible, what does that free IT leaders up to focus on? Where do you see leaders reinvesting that reclaimed time and capital?

SPEAKER_00 32:22

Yeah, I think the topical solutions are always these new, these waves of technology that I described earlier, cloud, security, AI, are always incredibly germane investments that the leaders are continuing to make because they're more complicated, they're more nuanced. I feel like the contact center is also an area where this is becoming, you know, another sort of revolution that AI is driving so much fractionalization within the contact center that there's becoming point solutions that are popping up everywhere. And you then make you have you then have to maintain the integrity between all those different point solutions. I mean, security is a great example of that. Like it used to be that you would just go to Dell or go to SecureWorks or go to IBM and they would do Cisco, they would do everything for you. And there's so much fragmentation. I think we're starting to see it consolidate a little bit back again, but there's it historically in the last like five years or so, been so much fragmentation that leaders have spent a lot of time figuring out how that point solution works with the rest of their environment. And I think that's not going to slow down, especially with AI. The leaders are increasingly focused on where is the data? How can AI interact with that data? How do I secure that data? And then how do I make sure that this is actually these AI investments that we're making are returning in ROI? That's the strategic stuff that I think deal leaders are dealing with right now. They're spending a disproportionate amount of time with some of those lower-level tasks that it could be focusing their attention on high value work and getting real return on their investment. That's you mentioned earlier, this is what boards are demanding. Boards are demanding, leadership is demanding this investment that's they think is going to lower cap lower labor costs, that's going to allow them to develop faster, come to market faster. And that's those are real business threats. Those are real business threats to your continued innovation. So I think that a lot of businesses are understanding how they're going to integrate AI into their stack and bringing it in as a part of a platform is probably the easiest way that you could just bring a platform in and then have the AI be built into the platform. But you know, that each leader, they like leaders have to evaluate those platforms and how they're capable of interacting with their environments.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Yeah. So what's one shift IT leaders can make right now that in relationship to telecom that would create the most leverage inside the organization?

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Yeah, I think I'm gonna go back to inventory, inventory, inventory. I'm a huge believer in you can't optimize what you can't see. So most enterprises, like I mentioned, are operating out that spreadsheet that was two years old and has out-of-date information. It doesn't give you a clear picture of all of the services that you have, including how those services are impacted by contracts, the spend. And that's step one of every vigilus engagement is doing our discovery where we help them onboard all the services into vigilus, reconcile it against the contracts, and then bring in insights from every single step, which helps us routinely uncover waste when those initial engagements and those initial inventory builds. So, but yeah, inventory I think is the biggest challenge with a lot of organizations is that telecom doesn't have a tool. It doesn't have a an inventory management tool that is incredibly accessible to all companies. And so that the challenge is that a lot, like a lot of people try and ship fit telecom in into a tool or they use a spreadsheet. And that when no one's inspecting it, when no one's managing it, it gets out of date really quickly. So continuous visibility, the continuous visibility that Vigilist offers really helps with you know ensuring that the inventory is up to date, ensuring that it's staying in compliance, ensuring that you're continually optimizing. So yeah, if you do nothing else listening to this episode, go pull your last three months worth of telecom invoices and compare them against your contract. And I almost guarantee you're gonna find something in there that will save you some money and maybe make the last 30 minutes or so worth of this conversation worth it.

SPEAKER_02 36:22

Wow, that's great. That's fantastic advice. And this really has been such a practical and insightful conversation. I do appreciate the clarity, the financial discipline you bring to this, to the telecom strategy. And I think it's something IT leaders don't realize they're missing until they see it framed this way. So that's great practical first steps. Go take a look, audit inventory, and see what you find. Steven, I'd like to just give you a minute, 30 seconds, whatever you want, quick elevator pitch on all of the things that Socium does in addition to the platform that you discussed.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so I'm super excited about the capabilities or bringing to market with our capability of helping identify and optimize from a consulting standpoint with our Navigo product. We help our clients navigate IT procurements. We help them find and buy technology. So that really helps with cleanup efforts and helps them ensure that they're rationalizing all the spend that they have and making sure that they're properly investing it in the right technology solutions to support their business. And then we built Vigilus with uh to continually monitor and maintain that in the integrity of that inventory. So Vigilis helps clients with project management, inventory management, service management, contract management, and expense management. That really helps lift that operational burden off their plates of continually reviewing their expenses, making sure that they're staying ahead of a re-rate, and then helping with things like MACDs that consume a lot of time with our clients going to the providers, sitting on these weekly calls, and maintaining their telecommunications environments. Our latest product is called Flux. And built on top of Lumen's network as a service product, we're helping clients automatic automatically manage bandwidth. So whether it be business hours, schedule changes or or automatic increases and decreases based on consumption, we're helping drive more effective bandwidth utilization with Flux. All these capabilities are built individualists, and we're really helping, I think, sh change the landscape and change the change the future of tech telecom management. We're helping companies or helping our clients execute on seeing telecommunications as a utility and really managing the utility in a way that makes it economic and efficient for them to reinvest in their own business and stop with the low-level low-level tasks that are involved in day-to-day operations.

SPEAKER_02 38:54

Yeah, that's fantastic. So if you're listening and you're thinking we need better visibility, tighter contract positioning, stronger vendor alignment, or just a smarter way to manage telecom across your organization, you can connect directly with Steven and the Socium IT team. Just head to technologymatch.com and search for Socium IT. You'll find their full solution portfolio there. I think we're gonna have to add flux before this episode gets out. That's the one that we're missing. So we'll get that added. So everything from contract negotiation, cost optimization to lifecycle management and implementation support, everything we talked about here today. We'll include direct links in the show notes and we'll get this new one added and include a link to that one as well. And then LinkedIn is always a great way to connect directly. Is that right, Steven?

SPEAKER_00 39:40

Yeah, absolutely. Or Socium IT on LinkedIn. Yeah. And thank you for having me. This has been an awesome conversation. And hopefully people take away a little bit of nuggets of helping them more effectively manage telecom.

SPEAKER_02 39:52

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you so much for being here again. I think it's, you know, a really enlightening conversation and honestly kind of shocking that there are that many sort of hidden costs and you know, that that much really on the surface that is available to save right away. So I hope everyone goes out there and takes a look at what they have and see if they can't find some savings right away. It's a super helpful conversation.

SPEAKER_00 40:20

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 40:21

Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to Between Fires and Futures. We know the weight tech leaders carry, the pressure, the pace, the constant pull between keeping things running and building what's next. If no one said it lately, you're doing hard, important work. And we see you. If this episode sparks something for you, follow the show, leave a review, and share it with another tech leader who gets it. Thanks again for listening. Keep leading through the fires and daring to build the future anyway.