At U.S.Bancorp, the monthly bill from one telecommunications supplier is so large that it typically arrives in 12 boxes. That supplier is just one of more than 300 telecom providers serving the bank.
Spending roughly $13 million on telecom services each month, the eighth-largest bank in the country found it could no longer manage the expense efficiently on its own, so about 10 months ago it turned to Broadmargin Inc. for help.
This week, Broadmargin is unveiling three telecom management packages on a hosted or outsourced basis. The company started in 1999 to help several carriers—Qwest Communications International Inc., SBC Communications Inc., BellSouth Corp., WorldCom Inc. and Cingular Wireless LLC, to name a few—manage their payments to one another. Now it is putting its technology to work weeding out unnecessary and bogus costs from the enterprise network.
Enterprise networks, particularly in the financial, health care and education sectors, grew considerably in size and complexity over the past decade, and in recent years most enterprises have been looking for ways to trim costs. Broadmargin aims its technology at companies that spend at least $1 million per month on telecom—a figure at which significant billing errors are apt to occur.