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of Brightfin. Formerly known as MDM/ MEM provider Mobility Solutions, the company re-emerged in May as Brightfin, offering channel partners a single system that allows their customers to view expenses across their mobile, fixed, and cloud (AWS, Azure, Google) services stacks. “When customer see the benefit from an expense management platform on the wireless side,” said Plum, “it stands to reason they would apply the same logic and try to employ similar services to increase their savings on the wired side.” The managed service play offers customers a unified interface to view expenses across their entire IT ecosys- tems, offering insight into where their devices are, where they are spending, how that spending can be optimized and where it might be smarter to reallocate future IT dollars. Think of it as a data visualization tool that allows the customer to see all IT expenses through various lenses, explained Plum, across geography, provider, cost center and more. “We wanted to give IT professionals visibility across the entire ecosystem,” Plum continued. “The goal is to make life easier for IT managers because it has gotten exponentially more difficult.” And since the Brightfin platform is built on ServiceNow, organizations can lever- age established automated workflows they may already have in place. Partners, meanwhile, gain access to a larger piece of a much larger pie. Whereas mobile expense dollars are typically about per device, fixed expense management is generally a percent of spending. And in most cases, fixed expense dwarf mobile expenses. “People are beginning to under- stand that spend on the fixed side is out of control,” said Plum. Customers are having trouble making heads or tails of invoices that can be hundreds or thousands of pages. “If it looks similar to the prior month, they pay it,” he continued. “It’s difficult for them to get a true picture of what their spend is. We go in and take a deeper dive, find ways to save them six or even seven figures.” Of course, going deeper into mobile/fixed/cloud expense manage - ment requires more effort from partners and longer buying cycles. Rather than just finding ways to save money on mobility, providers must gain an understanding of the customer’s entire IT ecosystem. “The conversation is definitely a little more sophisticated and is going to take a little more patience,” said Plum. “But now you are going to touch the custom- er across all of the tech stacks, which is going to make it a stickier play.” It appears, however, that partners at least will be spending less time evangelizing the benefits and poten - tial of expense management. Those days, for all intents and purposes, are over, as enterprises are now actively seeking help with managing and controlling increasingly dispersed and varied IT assets, said Plum. Gartner analysts agree, citing client interactions that show enterpris- es are looking for expense manage- ment providers to take control of more of their communications-related expenses across mobile, wireline and cloud. Enterprises also want provid- ers to offer lifecycle management services for end-user devices, said the research firm. “Many organizations that previously managed expenses related to telecom and IT internally find there are more frequent changes to an increasingly complex environment while costs are scrutinized, consequently challenging internal enterprise entities to control costs efficiently,” said Gartner analysts, “leading to the use of telecom expense management services.” o MOBILE & WIRELESS Source: ChannelVision Magazine survey Mobile Phone Policy: Company-owned PROVIDING 5G-CAPABLE SMARTPHONES/DEVICES TO EMPLOYERS PROVIDING AN ALLOWANCE OR STIPEND FOR EMPLOYEES TO UPGRADE THEIR WIRELESS DEVICE AND SERVICE TO 5G PROVIDING 5G-CAPABLE SMARTPHONES/DEVICES TO EMPLOYERS Tablet Policy: Company-owned Mobile Phone Policy: Personal Tablet Policy: Personal Enterprise 5G Smartphone Ownership Plans Source: Morning Consult; Verizon Already done/currently doing this Planning to do in the next 6 months Planning to do in the next 7 - 12 months Planning to do in the next 13-24 months No current plans to do this Don’t know/No opinion 24% 15% 25% 20% 23% 5% 22% 7% 20% 18% 8% 32% 7% 21% 31% 21% 10% 13% 4% 31% 21% 10% 10% 4% 36 CHANNEL V ISION | May 2021