The Technology Lifecycle

Our Approach to Technology Lifecycle Management

On the surface, technology and telecom seem simple enough. Your business selects the ideal carrier, signs on the dotted line, and deploys the technology assets and infrastructure your team needs to stay connected. But below the surface, provisioning, inventory, invoices, and interoperability lead to confusion and frustration.

In our experience, our clients’ most significant challenges are:

• Deciphering bills
• Technology implementation takes longer and more resources than budgeted
• Tracking technology assets
• Unplanned interoperability barriers

These challenges lead to delayed timelines and budgeting overruns into the thousands of dollars—and even millions for large enterprises.

Lifecycle Management Services

It’s our mission to help you optimize your information technology and telecommunications assets. Our team helps your business foresee and sidestep as many obstacles as possible – barriers that stand in the way of successfully adopting the right solutions.

By managing your technology lifecycle, your business saves money and trouble while maximizing productivity across your business processes. Here’s what that looks like at each stage of the technology lifecycle:

The Eight Stages of Lifecycle Management

Stage 1: Identification

As your business begins planning your next technology or transformation initiative, you may naturally start by researching and identifying the entire IT environment you need. However, if you can’t clarify why you need it, you’ll never establish specific project goals during the planning phase. On top of that, you also have to research and leverage hundreds of global providers to get a clear idea of which provider(s) offer the technology you’re interested in deploying. As technology converges, it is becoming even more complicated and confusing. Ultimately, the process is research-intensive, time-consuming, and requires resources.

What We Do:

Bluewave has the industry expertise to act as a force multiplier of your team to identify the technology you need and help you understand why you need it. Since we have working relationships with a global network of technology vendors and telecom carriers, our experts already have deep insight into the market and experience with previous implementation projects, significantly speeding up the identification phase while providing a solid foundation for success.

Stage 2: Sourcing

Even after you’ve identified the providers that offer the technology you’re interested in, you still need to pinpoint which of those check all your boxes. Sure, they may offer SD-WAN, but do they have the service levels and capabilities to integrate UCaaS or Security into your network architecture? If you don’t ask questions like this, you risk misinterpreting a provider’s offerings.

What We Do:

The experts at Bluewave determine which providers offer services that align with your broader project goals and existing architecture without missing any of the more minor details your business goals require. We know the questions and how to ask them, so you gain more clarity and insight from your options.

Stage 3: Contracting

Great—you’ve finally found the providers that best match your project goals, but now you have to understand how their pricing models work to select the right one for your budget. There are a lot of confusing fees and pricing structures in telecom and software—deciphering, usage, taxes, fees, rates, renewals, terms, and conditions. Lack of understanding means you will pay for more than you should.

What We Do:

As a robust technology partner, one of the languages Bluewave speaks is carriers and vendors. With decades of collective experience in the industry, we know how to decipher the contractual language, interpret pricing models, and leverage multiple vendors to ensure you get the best contract terms while providing realistic cost projections.

Stage 4: Procurement

By now, you think you must have gotten over the hump, and the rest of the project will be a downhill run. All you have left to do is buy and deploy the devices. Not entirely—this is often where the real work begins. During the procurement phase, the carrier will require documentation and information on existing services, locations, and more to figure out what you need before placing orders.

If you don’t provide the correct information at the right time, you risk costly project delays that can go on for months or more until you secure the proper documentation. Yet if you make the mistake of trying to simplify the process by “copying and pasting” your existing services from one provider to another, you’re at risk of overspending by 12% or more.

What We Do:

While providing vendors and carriers with hundreds or thousands of pieces of information may seem like a daunting task; it’s not for the experts at Bluewave. We help you locate and deliver the right documents to the right people at the right time. That way, you get the solution you need without overspending, and project timelines remain on track.

Stage 5: Implementation

During the implementation phase, you have to hand your project off to your project management team while coordinating vendors, staying ahead of timelines, and managing all the documentation. You’ve been working primarily with the service provider sales team until this stage, and now you have been handed off to the implementation team, which can have different project goals and expectations. When that happens, you have to project manage the implementation process yourself.

What We Do:

Many of our clients turn to us when they realize they don’t have the time, energy, or knowledge to project manage all the way through to implementation. Fortunately, that’s one of our specialties. If mistakes have been made during the previous four phases, we must take several steps back to get on the right path again. If we have been your partner the whole way through, we are by your side, ensuring the implementation goes smoothly.

Stage 6: Billing

We’ve already discussed one of the core pain points of billing— SaaS, telecom, and cloud bills can be confusing and sometimes misleading. We often encounter invoices that are written to protect the carrier or are not intuitive and make it difficult for you to identify billing errors. That makes it nearly impossible to understand what you’re truly paying for unless you know what you’re reading.

What We Do:

Bluewave draws on decades of hard-earned experience to help you understand and analyze invoices, thereby highlighting billing errors and clarifying precisely what you’re paying for and why your business genuinely needs it. We have a Technology Expense Management practice specializing in managing expenses and bill pay for many clients.

Stage 7: Change Management

After you’ve migrated services, your old carrier has no responsibility to disconnect services. That falls on you and your business. However, ending services generally requires a 30- or 60-day notification period, so if you don’t plan accordingly, you may end up double-paying for services you’ll never use. At the same time, if you don’t coordinate the transition, your business may absorb the cost of phantom services that could remain hidden for months or even years before anyone notices them.

What We Do:

Bluewave has the foresight to simplify the telecom transition period, so you only pay for what you need when you need it. Plus, we perform a detailed audit of your existing services and any new ones to eliminate the dead weight of phantom services.

Stage 8: Reporting

Bills aren’t the only difficult-to-decipher aspect of the telecom and communications world. Carriers’ and vendors’ reporting may not be easy to access or understand. Even when available, those reports don’t enable telecom inventory management, and they make it impossible to track services across multiple locations, multiple providers, multiple contracts, or bridge the gap between finance and IT.

What We Do:

We don’t leave reporting to the carriers—we take care of it ourselves. With our intuitive, real-time reporting tools, understanding where finance and IT intersect is easier than ever before. Our inventory management portal provides a real-time inventory and contract management platform that delivers telecom visibility and simplifies reporting across your organization, no matter how many locations you have.