Tangoe Claims Patent for Data Usage Analysis

Tangoe announced recently that it had been awarded a patent for technology that allows enterprises to analyze data usage patterns and assign the costs of such usage to different categories. Enterprises would be able to break down how the data in their data plans is being accessed and adjust their plans to save money or allocate data differently.

Orange, Connecticut-based Tangoe develops the Matrix solution that allows enterprises to manage mobile devices connected to the network. It also offers IT expense management for telecoms, cloud environments, and IT departments. Consulting services are available for companies seeking a strategic approach to their ICT services. Tangoe was also named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Managed Mobility Services, Worldwide back in October, ahead of companies like AT&T, Fujitsu, HP, and Deutsche Telekom.

One of Tangoe’s biggest success stories is how it saved GE $5 million in unnecessary mobile costs. Through an expense management tool it found that the employees were signing up for their own plans, going over plan limits, and getting reimbursed by GE for it. Some of these reimbursements were issued for people no longer working for the company! As a result of Tangoe’s solution, GE negotiated with telecoms to change to per minute plans and reduced unit costs by 50 percent.

Now that BYOD is here to stay for most companies, solutions like Tangoes’ become more and more valuable. They allow companies to differentiate between data used for company purposes and data for personal use. This empowers companies to restructure mobile service plans and in extreme cases, identify areas where money is flat out being wasted as GE did.

Gartner pointed out in its analysis of the aforementioned MMS Magic Quadrant that businesses can find all the MMS services they want in the marketplace, but that it may not be possible to find a single vendor that can satisfy all their MMS needs, especially if the business is a large multinational. If an MMS vendor was able to seize this as an opportunity, it might gain an advantage in the market. On the other hand, an MMS vendor must weigh the risk of pursuing such a goal against the risk of spreading itself too thin.