The real cost of telecommunications

Today, the size of the communications infrastructure necessary for companies to stay competitive is constantly increasing, both in terms of bandwidth and geographical coverage.

"Attempts by organisations to consolidate and analyse telecommunication billing information is virtually impossible," says Inthiaz Cassimjee, country manager, Africa and Middle East at Seagate Software.

Most companies receive billing information from telecom carriers, infrastructure vendors, and other service providers in a wide variety of formats. Furthermore, electronic services are traditionally distributed on a regional basis by several different carriers, which results in a complex maze of charges, fees and contractual obligations.

"Companies want a comprehensive system that is capable of handling multiple billing periods and multiple services or vendors, as well as the dissemination of information throughout the whole enterprise," he says. To meet this demand Seagate Software has introduced its eTelecom solution aimed at enabling organisations to realise the value of their telecommunication information by consolidating data from a variety of communication channels, and significantly reduce the cost of maintaining and supporting even the largest and most diverse electronic infrastructures.

"It transforms large amounts of meaningless data into valuable business information that can be used to perform extensive, flexible ad hoc reporting and analysis, the results of which help to significantly reduce the costs of corporate communication infrastructures," explains Cassimjee.

The key benefits of the eTelecom analytic application include the identification and quantification of usage of PBX, email and remote network access, consolidation of data sources for consistent, flexible review and analysis and a breakdown of call costs by category (national, international, voice calls and data calls by employee, cost centre and business unit by time period).

In addition to this, valuable reports, such as Top N, 80/20 analysis, exception reports, alerts, fastest growth, unusual values, and spikes may also be created and accessed.

According to Seagate, users also look for information on allocation of telecom costs by cost centre to enable increased control, and better budgeting and forecasting, detection of unusual usage ("unreasonable" line items in the bill such as high-cost calls, calls at strange times of the day, or long-duration calls) and accurate construction of capacity plans, using historical data and forecasts.