This week, we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of acquiring QuantumShift.
As the original founder of Telecom Expense Management (TEM) in the late 1990s in the SF Bay Area, QuantumShift had attracted venture capital funding from the likes of Mayfield and TWP and had been featured in Forbes and Inc. magazines for being disruptive and innovative. They had built a solution to address the waste that companies were incurring in one of their largest expenses, telecom. The solution afforded companies of all sizes and industry a single source for procuring best-of-breed voice, data and Internet communications from the top service providers. QuantumShift’s web-based platform lets these companies point and click to add, move or change voice and data services, while delivering those services on a single bill.
Having witnessed the same problem of telecom waste and started vCom across the San Francisco Bay in September 2001, it was logical for us to initially partner with QuantumShift to resell their software platform to our clients. And ultimately, we were excited to acquire QuantumShift’s CLEC business in June 2004, expanding the value proposition of helping companies manage their telecom spend, nationally. Four years later, vCom built its own software platform, vManager, and eventually expanded the platform’s capabilities to support managing customers’ existing environment. Telecom management soon grew to IT management, with vCom offering customers a comprehensive suite of IT spend management solutions to help them gain control and visibility over all their network, mobile, hardware, collaboration, cloud and SaaS services. One of those solutions is vCom’s buyers’ club, which we re-branded QuantumShift a couple of years ago to create some additional clarity.
Shawn Swift, former CIO of one of vCom’s longtime customers once referred to QuantumShift as “nirvana.” He told a group of his peers at one of vCom’s Customer Summits: “If I can get all my IT services on a single invoice from QuantumShift, that would be nirvana.” Today, 90% of clients leverage QuantumShift for the management of their IT services from global internet connectivity and POTS transformation; to 5G fixed wireless services; to SASE from the leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. QuantumShift has a dedicated team that manages over 80 domestic and international service providers on behalf of its customers.
The thing that has made QuantumShift unique all these years is our fundamental belief that the core values aren’t just low pricing, technology expertise and great service – those are all table stakes. Customers are buying access to aggregated buying power and pre-negotiated industry-leading terms with their provider of choice. They are buying consolidation of multiple vendors and technologies on a single invoice managed by a single team with a provider-agnostic approach. They are buying a simple, normalized invoice, in lieu of tens of invoices filled with jargon and acronyms that make it impossible to understand what they’re paying for. And they’re buying integration into a comprehensive IT spend management platform that enables them to manage their entire IT environment, not bits and pieces.
IT is ever evolving. Looking to the future, we see a great opportunity for vCom to help a significantly larger number of customers navigate that evolution effectively with all its IT spend management solutions, particularly QuantumShift, while still delivering on our four values: Aggregation, Consolidation, Normalization and Integration.
As we look back on the past two decades, we couldn’t have achieved great success in supporting our customers without our tenured employees who have poured their hearts and souls into making us successful; or without our partners who have helped us deliver on our promise to our customers. We owe each of them a debt of gratitude as we look to double down in our third decade!
