There’s a new name to remember in the Telecom Expense Management (TEM) vendor market space – as though there weren’t already enough to keep you busy, with hundreds of businesses in North America alone marketing themselves as TEM vendors.  But fear not, you can also toss one of those names in the memory archive because Invoice Insight, a 10-year veteran in this space, has recently rebranded as Xigo. Why? To shed the “old school” image of a vendor focused solely on telecom invoice management. Invoice Insight – excuse me, Xigo – and much of the TEM market has moved beyond the simple value proposition of validating invoices and disputing charges.  Many of these solutions address the effective management of all telecom-related activities, including inventory and asset management, ordering and provisioning management, workflow automation, and even device disposal. It’s this focus on the more complete life-cycle management of telecom assets that instigated the change in name. A name, Dave Snow, Chief Marketing Officer at Xigo says was chosen to be “timeless for a timeless brand.” Ahmmm, the verdict is still out on the name.

But along with its rebranding, Xigo introduced its family of products: Xigo enterprise, Xigo pro, and Xigo now – the latter of which is free. Yes, that wasn’t a typing error. They’re offering their entry product, Xigo now, an automated service built to analyze the wireless bills of companies with up to 50,000 mobile phones under management, for free – for those of you outside the US whose interest may be piqued, sorry, for now this is just a US freebee. But why are they doing this at all? Surely not out of the goodness of their hearts. They are, after all, a vendor playing in a highly competitive marketplace. Well there are a couple of good reasons:

  • 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. The Xigo name will then be front of mind (remember this is a vendor field of hundreds) as organizations expand or management needs grow, and a customized or more comprehensive solution is needed.
  • . . . And capitalizing on the information at their fingertips. As organizations continue to see ever increasing mobile spend, many are wondering how their spend stacks up to their industry peers.  But there’s limited data on enterprise mobile spend today. With its free product, Xigo will conceivably have access to the mobile spend behavior of hundreds, perhaps thousands of organizations. Anonymize that information and Xigo becomes a source of mobile spend data and trends for those willing to buy business intelligence in this space.

This play is sure to cull out some of the smaller TEM providers solely focused on the wireless space and cause some of the larger veterans to take notice and reposition their pricing strategy.

If you’re interested in checking out the new brand and its family of products for yourself, remember to add Telecom or Invoice Insight along with Xigo in your search term. Xigo Health, Xigo Nanotools, and Xigo Broadcasting Equipment are a few other businesses that beat them to the punch – yeah, still not that sure about the name.

You can access the original press release at: http://www.xigo.com/news_events/press_040511.html