Flat budget, reduced budget: these are the themes of many CFOs when they discuss costs with IT and telecom managers. You cannot avoid these discussions.
There are many large and small budget recommendations that can be followed. Some produce one time savings while others produce savings year after year. The more savings that can be generated, the more likely you will have your budget approved rather than cut by executive management.
If you are in this situation--and who is not--and are attending Enterprise Connect in Orlando on March 2, then you should come to the session, "Top 5 Ways to Save Money on Communications."It is possible that one or more of the panel recommendations will pay for the cost of attending Enterprise Connect.
The session description is:
No one's sure how quickly the economy will recover, but it’s likely that no matter what the pace of improvement, cost savings will continue to dominate the agendas of many if not most enterprise communications managers. So this session is intended to provide you with 5 solid, action-oriented items that have a high likelihood of producing quick savings in your communications expenses. You will leave this session with a to-do list so that, even if you’ve already started some of the tasks on our list, you’ll have suggestions for ways to improve on what you’ve already accomplished.
We will be focusing on the following questions during the session:
* What steps will save you the most money the fastest? How much can you realistically expect to save?
* If you’ve already begun some of these initiatives, how can you improve on what you’ve started?
* How do you quantify these savings: By immediate budget reduction, or lowering of Total Cost of Ownership?
* What areas of your communications spend are most likely to be sources of “hidden cost”--Wireless? WAN links? Server proliferation?
Here are some of the budget controlling, budget reducing topics that will be presented:
* Low power IP phones
* Contract management
* Device consolidation
* Managed and hosted UC
* Network optimization
An additional five budget recommendations will also be presented. Once all the panel members have presented their recommendations, the moderator, Byron Battles of The Battles Group LLC will be opening the session for comments and questions from the audience.
Stephen Leaden of Leaden Associates, Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research, Doug Carolus of N'compass and I will be on the panel. Each of us will be presenting a brief description of two possible budget reducers as part of the panel. We each proposed as many as five budget solutions, however there is not enough time to cover them all. The additional budget solutions, nine in total, that we do not have time for during the session, will be listed by Byron at the end of the session.
This should be one of the sessions that you must attend. You may learn that you have already followed most of these recommendations. I am sure that you will still learn of some budgeting solutions that are worth going home with to your CFO.
