The Facebook initial public offering provides important direction for telecom expense management programs, and mobility. 

First, the popularity of Facebook, which made the IPO possible, reveals how employees are using new ways of communicating. Conversations using social media is replacing phone calls. Instead of picking up a phone to speak to friends, employees now go online to communicate with friends. 

 Monitoring of abuse needs to shift from phone calls to network use and data consumption. In addition, most companies will find there are savings from reducing phone capacity. They will slo find that there are new opportunities to optimize data services. Identifying sites where T1 lines have been continually added to the point where there are six or eight of them will reveal situations where they can be replaced with a single T3 line. The T3 line is less costly and equal to 28 T1 lines. 

Second, the Facebook IPO was stung by issues relating to the impact of more users access the site using mobile devices. Enterprises need to take note of this as well. Employees are using mobile devices and replacing use of mobile voice with mobile data services. Are your mobile pools too large? Perhaps you are paying for voice minutes that you are not using. Also, with AT&T and Verizon ending their unlimited data plans, it is time to update your mobile policies for data consumption. Also, enterprises need reporting to monitor data usage to ensure that employees have the right plans for their needs. 

The Facebook IPO has different significance as an important milestone. TEM programs can mark this milestone by working to ensure they maximize the savings from optimizing voice and data services for fixed and mobile services. If you don’t have the tools or resources to ensure that your fixed and mobile networks are optimized, ask one of TEMIA’s members.