By: Rob Bye

Enterprise connectivity has quietly become one of the most critical layers of modern business. Cloud strategies, AI workloads, global collaboration, and digital customer experiences all assume that the underlying network will “just work.” Yet in many organizations, telecom and network services are still managed with limited transparency: fragmented data, inconsistent inventories, and disconnected lifecycle processes.

At the same time, the macro environment is tightening. IDC expects global spending on telecom and pay TV services to grow in the low single digits over the next several years, underscoring the pressure on operators and enterprises to do more with essentially flat budgets. Uptime Institute’s 2024 analysis shows that the frequency and severity of outages have not meaningfully improved, even as infrastructure becomes more complex and more workloads move off-premises. And Gartner’s 2024 Market Guide for Telecom Expense Management (TEM) highlights how difficult it remains for enterprises to get a complete, accurate view of their telecom costs and assets—despite decades of cost-control efforts.

Taken together, these trends point to a simple conclusion: telecom transparency is now a strategic requirement, not a nice-to-have.

The Hidden Cost of Low Transparency

Most large enterprises source connectivity from dozens or even hundreds of providers across regions and services. Each provider brings its own portals, contract structures, billing formats, and support processes. Over time, this leads to:

• Inconsistent or outdated inventories
• Difficulty reconciling invoices with live services
• Limited visibility into which circuits support which workloads
• Fragmented accountability for outages, performance, and renewals

TEM platforms have helped by centralizing invoices, normalizing charges, and identifying savings opportunities—often in the range of 10 to 30 percent during the first year of optimization. But expense management tools rarely fix the structural issues that create blind spots in the first place: incomplete service records, overlapping contracts, and a lack of end-to-end lifecycle visibility.

At the same time, outages remain both frequent and costly. Uptime Institute reports that the distribution of outage severity has changed little in recent years, despite increased investment and awareness, and that a meaningful share of serious incidents still result in six- or seven-figure business impacts. When connectivity supports revenue-critical applications, gaps in transparency can quickly become material financial risks.

Why Traditional Telecom Lifecycle Management Falls Short

Legacy telecom management practices evolved in a world of static branch networks, predictable traffic patterns, and relatively slow change. Today’s environment looks very different. Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures require a multi-faceted approach. Distributed workforces and edge locations have shifted traffic loads, while AI and data-intensive applications drive dynamic traffic patterns. A flow of continuous changes in provider portfolios, access technologies, and pricing are further complicating the mix.

Yet many organizations still rely on a patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads, provider portals, and lightly integrated systems to manage orders, changes, renewals, and disputes.

Industry frameworks recognize the complexity. MEF’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) reference architecture, for example, explicitly calls for end-to-end coordination across multiple network domains and services—from Carrier Ethernet and IP VPN to SD-WAN and cloud connectivity. But while service providers have invested heavily in orchestration, enterprises often lack equivalent transparency across their own multi-provider environments.

Cloud documentation tells the same story from another angle. AWS connectivity and networking whitepapers describe a growing array of options—Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, Site-to-Site VPN, PrivateLink, multi-VPC architectures—each with different cost, resiliency, and operational trade-offs. Without a clear, accurate view of existing circuits, contracts, and performance, it becomes very difficult for enterprises to select, design, and evolve connectivity in a disciplined way.

The result is a structural gap: service providers may be automating their domains, but many enterprises still lack a unified operating model across all of them.