The TEMs, They Are A-Changin'
Well it’s been quite a week; the former Invoice Insight is now officially Xigo. And, if you’re reading this you’ve already found the site—good work! Hopefully you got here through some of the press coverage of our rebranding and the launch of our new free and low-cost services, Xigo Now and Xigo Pro. We always knew these ideas would be game changers, and now there are a whole lot of people who agree with us.
We came out of the gate on Tuesday with MobileCrunch breaking our story. TechCrunch, too. NetworkWorld followed with some great insight on the TEM industry and why we think it needed to change so much, we went ahead and changed everything—our name, our solutions, even our pricing. Xigo Now offers 100 percent of what most companies need to prudently manage their wireless telecommunications expenses—for free. We like saying that because…well, no one else can.
That makes Xigo an innovator in an industry that sorely needs innovation. If you think that’s marketing puffery, you don’t have to take our word—Gartner thinks so, too. Here’s what Research Vice President Eric Goodness had to say about the current state of the TEM market:
“The Gartner TEM Magic Quadrant identified a pervasive lack of innovation in the Telecom Expense Management (TEM) industry. The observation directly addresses the service automation technology used by the TEM companies; moreover, the same lack of innovation is also manifest in their go-to-market packaging and bundling of service features,” said Eric Goodness, Research Vice President, Gartner, Inc. “In our customer reference surveys for the TEM MQ, nearly 40 percent of respondents were on their second or third TEM provider and 15 percent had used four or five TEM providers in their pursuit for a quality vendor. Given the opportunity costs associated with bid development and vendor selection and the switching costs if there is vendor dissatisfaction; users need to be able to reduce the risks associated with conducting due diligence for TEM solutions.”
Other analyst firms concur. AOTMP’s Tim Colwell released a Market Alert that called Xigo’s new solutions “one of the most compelling developments in the TEM market in a very long time and holds promise to be a true game-changer. Xigo addresses two obstacles to growth frequently encountered by competitors: (1) lengthy evaluation and supplier selection cycles by prospects and (2) wireless service pricing models anchored to device quantity and/or monthly spend. Xigo has eliminated these obstacles with its Xigo Now and Xigo Pro offerings. Xigo Now is a free-for-life wireless expense management solution delivered through a self-service portal. Enterprises may subscribe, load invoices and wireless details and begin to manage their wireless expenses immediately. Xigo touts features and functionality required to meet the majority of client needs with Xigo Now.”
And Forrester’s Onica King wrote yesterday that “There’s A New Name In The Telecom Expense Management Landscape.” She rightly calls out what’s been sorely missing in TEM – a solution for SMB’s, too: “It’s all about capturing the market. . . Today, most TEM vendors focus on enterprise-class customers with telecom spends of $1M per annum or more. The small-to-medium business (SMB) market has pretty much gone untapped. But these organizations also have to contend with managing increasingly expanding mobile spend. Xigo is counting on the attractiveness of a free platform that provides key, though basic mobile spend management features to pull in the SMB market today.”
We agree. And it looks like a lot of you agree, too.
Categories:
Industry Observations, Xigo Research