On June 16th 2017, Marlin Equity Partners (owner of Asentinel) completed the acquisition of Tangoe Inc. Asentinel and Tangoe have now merged and will operate under the brand Tangoe. What will happen next and what should we expect from this merge ?

Note: the ideas presented in this article are my (Toni Lazazzera) personal views based on my own experience and best guesses based on information available from public sources (no insider information)

The concept of TEM (Telecom Expense Management) emerged around the years 2000. Since then, countless companies have developped TEM solutions for local/regional/global markets. In fact, when I founded my company Tmanco in 2003, my goal was to develop a kind of TEM solution, which I did under the name GERTRUDE. However in 2008 I decided to stop GERTRUDE and partner with Anatole to distribute their solution.

Because every telecom carrier uses different systems, tarif models and processes, developping and maintaining a TEM solution requires alot of resources and the delivery also requires much human power. That’s why TEM found an easier ground in USA with a large market and few carriers. Different situation in Europe with many small markets and lots of carriers.

Anatole was a leader in Europe. By growing in a challenging environment, it was forced to be agile and the product ATEM is still very flexible. I have customers using ATEM for whom I could develop small add-ons that enable special features without involvment from Anatole developpers. One example is DHL where we do a very custom cost-allocation.

The new Tangoe has the genes from Anatole, Asentinel, Tangoe and the many others that Tangoe had acquired before. With each acquisition came an existing TEM solution and there are now probably lots of solutions on the shelves and out there at customers. With each acquisition came also exceptional people, leaders, developpers. Tangoe has now all the ingredients to build a fabulous product from scratch, taking the best from each. It will take time but I am convinced we will be positively surprised.

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