Ask enterprises why their technology costs are so hard to control, and you’re likely to hear from many that it goes back to 2020 and the sudden shift to remote work, the scattering of offices and invoices, and the loss of centralized visibility. It’s a convenient explanation, for sure, but it may not be entirely accurate.
"I don't know that I'm going to say it's residual, because my experience is that it has always been there," Clari Rosa-Garcia, Product Director for Pure IP FinOps said, when asked whether pandemic-era waste still lingers in corporate technology budgets. "I think what has not changed is the fact that people just don't have the bandwidth. We are busier now than we were before, so we have even less time to address those little things — and when you multiply them, they just stack up and become a big problem."
There’s no question enterprises struggle to reign in their technology spend and, while COVID-19 may have accelerated distributed work and made much of the technology spend harder to see, it didn’t actually create the underlying problem. Large organizations have always accumulated costs faster than busy teams can identify and eliminate them.
The problem is especially visible across carrier and network spending, where services stretch across locations, contracts, accounts and suppliers. A modest rate increase may not attract attention, nor will one redundant circuit or a service that remained active after an office moved. But, multiply those costs across dozens or hundreds of locations, then allow them to continue month after month, and seemingly minor inefficiencies become very meaningful budget items.
That challenge is what led Pure IP, a BCM One company, to relaunch Pure IP FinOps platform — its intelligent technology cost management platform. The redesigned platform pairs a faster, AI-enabled interface with the same managed services backbone the company has operated for 17 years. But, perhaps the bigger story is about how enterprise cost creep happens and why fixing it looks less like a periodic finance exercise and more like an ongoing operational one.
Pure IP FinOps is a carrier-neutral technology cost management platform and managed service designed to give enterprises a consolidated view of their communications and network spending. It brings together invoices, contracts, service inventory and account data across multiple carriers and locations, then compares what an organization is being billed against contracted rates and the services it actually has in place. The platform supports expenses including wireline and wireless services, voice, internet, private lines and other carrier-provided network services, giving finance and IT teams a common record of what they have, what they are paying for, and where those services are deployed.
While this might seem at first glance like a traditional telecom expense management (TEM) solution, that’s only part of it — Pure IP FinOps goes far beyond TEM.
It’s more than just gathering data and consolidating it into reports. Pure IP audits invoices for billing discrepancies, normalizes and maintains service inventory, identifies potential optimization opportunities and works with customers on an ongoing basis to address them. It will also work with carriers to re-negotiate contracts when necessary. That managed service component is central to the model: Rather than simply flagging a questionable charge or unused service and leaving the customer to act on it, Pure IP’s team regularly reviews those opportunities with clients and tracks them through resolution.
The newly redesigned experience adds faster access to the underlying data and AI-powered natural-language queries, but the core function remains continuous oversight of technology costs across complex, distributed environments.
Pure IP FinOps is aimed primarily at organizations with 15 or more locations and roughly $40,000 or more in monthly technology spend. Importantly, because of its carrier-neutral approach, businesses don’t need to be existing Pure IP customers and can use Pure IP FinOps as a standalone service.
The Real Problem Isn't Visibility — It's Follow-Through
Rosa-Garcia said changing carrier behavior is a factor. Many of them are trying to step back from certain types of businesses and, instead of simply terminating those customers, they are charging more for certain services, making them more expensive to retain. Think of it as a sort of silent firing by carriers.
But, that doesn’t always result in the intended results. As Rosa-Garcia explained, “There’s a level of cost creep, but many businesses don’t have the time or the bandwidth to address it.”
The result is paying more for services than an organization should, or retaining services they don’t need.
When you combine that with staff that are already stretched thin, costs can accumulate without anyone making an obviously bad decision. A rate increase lands on an invoice. A legacy service keeps billing after a migration. An office moves, but everything associated with the old location isn't disconnected. Each of these items may be relatively small. The problem is nobody has the time to continuously look for all of them.
They add up quickly, though. Pure IP reports that customers typically recover 3% to 8% of technology spend and reduce network expenses by 10% to 20% with its FinOps service. Rosa-Garcia said the tech spend savings generally comes from comparing contracts against invoices during an initial evaluation, identifying billing errors and, in some cases, renegotiating contracts.
The larger opportunity emerges once the organization builds a normalized inventory of what it actually has.
"It becomes very apparent if they have excess services installed at any one of their locations," she said. "We find a lot of savings from things like migrations."
She pointed to one customer now undergoing its fourth network migration. Each migration creates another opportunity for old and new services to overlap, leaving circuits or other resources behind, which continue generating invoices until someone catches them. That’s where resource constraints become a financial liability.
This gap exposes a weakness in traditional expense management and where Pure IP FinOps goes beyond the traditional model: Identifying a problem isn't the same as solving it.
While many similar services provide a platform that delivers data and reports, they generally leave customers to figure out the next steps on their own. Pure IP goes further, positioning its FinOps platform as a co-managed service, with client meetings generally every two weeks and no less frequently than monthly.
"There's nothing like a meeting to get something done," Rosa-Garcia said. "If we just send the data to somebody in an email or a report, they may or may not act on it. When it becomes part of an agenda item, it tends to get resolved."
That may be the more important evolution from traditional TEM. Simply creating visibility isn’t enough. Enterprises have plenty of reports and the harder problem is turning an identified opportunity into action, which is where the co-managed model shines.
M&A Shows Why Cost Management Has to Be Continuous
Few environments demonstrate that problem better than mergers and acquisitions. An acquisition can introduce an entire new collection of carriers, contracts, locations, billing accounts and legacy services virtually overnight. Employees change responsibilities, networks are consolidated, offices close and migrations begin. In that environment, cost creep isn't just a data problem, but can become an institutional memory problem as well.
Rosa-Garcia explained that normalized network services data can become a persistent source of truth even as people change jobs, companies reorganize, and acquisitions reshape the enterprise. The people responsible for a particular service may change, but the underlying record of what the company owns, what it pays for, and where services reside does not have to.
Hackensack Meridian Health offers a useful example. What began as a single-merger engagement in 2016 has become a standing part of the health system's acquisition process, according to Francisco Maciel, the organization's Accounts Payable Director. The company credits Pure IP FinOps with $1.8 million in documented savings.
"When they first audited our telecom estate, the volume of unused lines we were paying for justified the engagement on its own," Maciel said. "Nearly ten years later, Pure IP is the first call we make when an acquisition is announced."
Rosa-Garcia said one acquisition-heavy client uses the service near the beginning of the onboarding process to catalog what has been inherited before the migration even begins.
"Everything centralized, everything documented, everything normalized really helps them out," she commented. .
That potentially moves technology cost management upstream from cleaning up after an acquisition to becoming part of the integration playbook itself. Regardless of the industry, it’s easy to see where technology cost management be a valuable as part of the M&A or restructuring process, making the transition easier for customer IT teams or their MSP partners. Any distributed organization going through acquisitions, location turnover, network migrations or restructuring is continually creating opportunities for billing and inventory to drift apart.
AI Makes the Data Easier to Reach
The most visible part of the FinOps relaunch is AI-powered interaction with spend, contract and inventory data. This enables users to ask direct questions, rather than searching for specific data or reports on their own. For Pure IP, this is bringing AI into the technology to solve a practical problem, rather than simply adding AI for the sake of AI.
"We manage over 350 carriers right now, so I feel like I know every single platform out there," Rosa-Garcia said. "One of my frustrations is asking the chat a whole bunch of questions or being guided to ask specific questions and then not getting the answer I needed, and then having to turn around and make a phone call anyway."
Pure IP built the experience around questions its clients already ask. Someone preparing to relocate an office might request the full inventory associated with that site. A department owner might ask for technology costs allocated to a particular general ledger account during a specific period rather than sorting through a company-wide report.
The AI provides a faster interface to the underlying data across carriers and providers, reducing the time and effort between a question and the information required to answer it. In other words, the technology makes cost information easier to access, but savings still depend on an operational process that consistently turns information into action.
There is also a channel implication. Pure IP allows authorized partners to access reporting, the application, and participate in recurring customer reviews. That potentially gives a partner something more valuable than another product to sell — visibility into where a customer may be wasting money.
For MSPs, agents and other technology advisors, helping a customer find budget can create a very different conversation from simply asking for more of it. Savings recovered from unnecessary services can strengthen the customer's bottom line or potentially be redirected toward newer technology initiatives. Undoubtedly, it also helps MSPs develop stronger trusted relationships with their customers.
The real story here isn’t a redesigned dashboard or a product relaunch, but the recognition that technology optimization can’t be treated as an annual (or even less frequent) cleanup exercise. Services are added, employees leave, offices move, carriers change pricing, companies acquire other companies, and networks migrate from one architecture to another, sometimes repeatedly. These are all business realities, and every one of those events creates another opportunity for contracts, invoices and actual usage to drift apart.
Pure IP FinOps takes a practical approach to a real problem with a continuously managed layer sitting across that complexity. It’s designed to keep surfacing the same deceptively simple question until someone acts on it: Are you still paying for something you no longer need?
Edited by
Erik Linask
