To many organizations, wireless expenses can seem like a black hole. You want all your mobile users getting the most from their devices… and your company wants to get the most for the dollars spent. But can you tell who’s doing what? Do you know where all the costs are? Are you doing everything you can to trim those expenses? Clearly cutting off all BlackBerry use is not the way to go.
BoxTone for BlackBerry TCO ROI WEM TEM
In our experience, lack of detailed visibility, tools and process often gets in the way of reigning in mobile expenses. So, on Wednesday, May 27, BoxTone hosted a webinar with analyst/editor Joanie Wexler – author of Network World’s Wireless in the Enterprise newsletter and The Voice Report’s The Wireless Pulse e-zine – to examine the evolution of WEM and how to optimize TCO.
The webinar – entitled “Time to Take Control of Your BlackBerry Expenses” – looked at how Telecom Expense Management (TEM) is now expanding to Wireless Expense Management (WEM), discussed models for calculating both ROI and TCO for BlackBerry, and then explored 3 approaches for trimming BlackBerry wireless expense.
From an ROI perspective, typically BlackBerry brings 1 hour of additional productivity per user per business day which can compute to be $15,000 or more per mobile user per year, says Ipsos-Reid. Likewise annual TCO can range between $2,100 and $2,500 per user, according to Gartner. So we see great ROI ratios but a cost we all want to trim where we can.
The webinar includes formulas that you can use for calculating your own TCO and ROI. The TCO model suggests $1550 average cost which includes $775 in carrier/external expenses (annual data plans, data roaming, support) and $775 in internal IT Operations expenses (server hw/sw, support, operations, training). Many people only think of the data plans when they think of wireless expenses, and that’s only half the pie.
Jonie reviewed results from Aberdeen Research that calculates effective Wireless Expense Management (WEM) can save enterprises $276 per mobile user each year – about 42 percent off a typical organization’s annual wireless data service plan.
But for large BlackBerry smartphone deployments, effective WEM is almost impossible because responsibility can span multiple departments with no single owner (IT Operations, PC support, and Telcom) and organizations rarely have real-time visibility into actual usage and the tools/processes to manage total cost to serve.
So the webinar details three approaches to reducing TCO:
- Tracking actual in-the-field activity for data plan use and roaming
- Deploying support automation and user self-service for fewer incidents with lower support costs
- Tracking underutilized devices to reallocate or decommission
The cost savings potential is substantial:
- Save ~ $77,500 in no-use & low-use device recapture @ 5%
- Save ~ $142,500 in IT mobile support costs @ HD
- Total hard cost savings of $220,000 per 1000 users (or $220 per user)
You can calculate your own cost savings potential here.
If you’re in telecom procurement, mobile messaging, finance, or head up expense teams responsible for BlackBerry services, this session is one you can’t afford to miss. To view a free replay of “Time to Take Control of Your BlackBerry Expenses,” click here.
Tags: Best Practices, BlackBerry, Cost Savings, Management & Monitoring
