Tangoe Acquires MOBI – Part IV: Market Considerations and Conclusion

Note: if you missed Part III of this blog series, catch up and read Part III: Enterprise Considerations

This is part of a four-blog series exploring Tangoe’s acquisition of MOBI.
Part I: Context for the Acquisition
Part II: Why?
Part III: Enterprise Considerations
Part IV: Market Considerations and Conclusion

Industries: Enterprise Mobility Management, Technology Expense Management

Key Stakeholders: CIO, CFO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Mobility Officer, Mobility Directors and Managers, Procurement Directors and Managers, Accounting Directors and Managers

Why It Matters: Tangoe is the largest technology expense management vendor. By purchasing MOBI, Tangoe gains Managed Mobility expertise, a customer base with high customer satisfaction, and expertise in Robotic Process Automation to support enterprise mobility.

Top Takeaway: Tangoe continues to aggressively acquire market leaders both to increase market share and add Best-in-Breed capabilities, personnel, and technology to its technology management portfolio.

Tangoe Acquires MOBI

On December 5th, 2018, Tangoe announced the acquisition of MOBI, a leading managed mobility services organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana in the United States. With this acquisition, Tangoe increases its IT spend under management to over $40 billion, increasing its lead over other spend management vendors with multiple billions of dollars of enterprise technology under management including Flexera, Snow Software, Microsoft Azure Cost Management, CloudHealth by VMware, Calero, MDSL, Cass Information Systems, and Sakon.

Market Considerations

It is a basic IT premise that the larger, more complex, and more customized a solution is, the less likely it is that the client will be fully satisfied with the solution. This is why solution providers for the largest enterprises will almost never have better customer satisfaction scores in end-user surveys and reviews that competitors that are serving smaller clients or take on smaller projects.

(As an aside, this is a consistent weakness in end-user review websites that they have not figured out yet. Mid-market solutions will always have higher customer satisfaction scores than solutions with an enterprise customer base: this is a well-known sample bias for those of us with enterprise B2B market research experience, but not well-known to some of these organizations that are relatively new to analyzing review data.)

Large enterprise challenges are difficult and there is no silver bullet solution. TEM and MMS are no different in this regard in that companies with over $100 million in annual spend under management or with over 25,000 cellular devices are always going to be extremely difficult to support.

Conclusion

As IT silos break down, sourcing and procurement become harder to govern, and employees demand increasingly personalized technology ecosystems to support their day-to-day work, the worlds of telecom, mobility, and end-user computing are increasingly coming together. This forces IT employees, especially those in telecom and mobility, to expand their knowledge of cloud, the Internet of Things, and applications.

In response, technology expense vendors must expand their support of mobile devices, usage plans, and IT subscriptions as all aspects of IT, all the way up to the crown jewels of data centers and mainframes, become subscription or usage-based. And this shift creates increased complexity as there are more opportunities for mismatches between IT demands and vendor capabilities to meet those demands.

In that overriding context of technology change, Tangoe’s acquisition of MOBI was a good decision in that this:

• allows Tangoe to improve its support for managed mobility across the wide variety of devices and apps across the enterprise
• provides an opportunity to provide more personalized managed mobility services, and
• gives MOBI customers access to expertise across aspects of the IT portfolio that Tangoe has expertise in supporting and consulting.

Ultimately, Amalgam Insights expects Tangoe’s acquisition of MOBI to ultimately be a two-way street as Tangoe takes MOBI’s best practices for customer service into account and MOBI scales its capabilities to support Tangoe’s considerable customer base.

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To read this report in full and to purchase inquiry time to discuss the repercussions of this acquisition for your organization, please download the report at https://www.amalgaminsights.com/product/amalgam-insights-market-milestone-tangoe-acquires-mobi-to-enhance-mobility-management-capabilities/