Michael Giffney
Managing Director and Founder, VoicePlus Data Pty Ltd
Michael Giffney founded VoicePlus in 1994 and has spent almost thirty years working on how organisations across Australia and New Zealand buy, manage, secure and pay for their mobile and telecommunications estates.
He came to it from finance rather than telecommunications. A Fellow of the Institute of Public Accountants, he spent thirteen years in accounting and financial management before founding VoicePlus, including as Chief Financial Officer at Fairbrother Construction, as an accountant at the Trident Group, and earlier at Hartogen Energy. That background is the reason the work has always started with the invoice.
What he writes about
Four themes recur, and they are the four problems VoicePlus was built to solve.
- Telecom expense management. Carrier invoice auditing, dispute and credit recovery, plan and usage optimisation, and contract governance. Telecom is one of the few significant enterprise expenses where the supplier calculates the charge and the customer has no practical way to verify it.
- Asset management. An accurate, reconciled record of every device and service, who holds it and which cost centre owns it. Most cost leakage and most security exposure trace back to the same root cause, which is an inventory nobody can produce on request.
- The technical requirements of managing security. Endpoint and device security at scale, through Microsoft Intune and the MDM, EMM and UEM disciplines around it, under ISO/IEC 27001 and the ACSC Essential Eight. Security policy is straightforward to write and considerably harder to enforce across a mixed fleet.
- Streamlining process and productivity. Removing the manual administration that device and telecom management generates, from procurement and staging through to offboarding. VoicePlus has eliminated over 104,000 hours of manual work through automation, and that number is the point of the exercise rather than a by-product of it.
Independence
VoicePlus holds no carrier affiliations, commission arrangements or referral fees. That shapes both how the business operates and what Michael argues for in print: a provider paid by the carriers whose bills it audits cannot act wholly in the customer's interest, and the conflict shows most clearly at the point of dispute.
VoicePlus
Established in 1996 as Australia's first independent managed mobility provider, VoicePlus now manages more than 25,000 devices across Australia and New Zealand, has optimised $7.5 million in telecom spend, and operates from North Sydney with a branch office in Auckland.
The company is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified and is the only Australian company recognised in the Gartner Market Guide for Managed Mobility Services.
Michael works directly with enterprise and government clients on carrier benchmarking, tender governance and telecom cost recovery, which is where most of the material on this site comes from.
Outside VoicePlus
Michael has spent over a decade volunteering in sailing at club, state and national level. As NSW Training Co-ordinator for the NSW and ACT 9er Association he created the Skiff Skills programme, introducing more than 100 young sailors to Olympic pathway skiff racing through a sponsored fleet of six boats across Sydney clubs. He served as President of the Australian 9er Association from 2022 to 2025, overseeing three national championships across New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland, and earlier as Rear Commodore and Treasurer at Northbridge Sailing Club.
Articles by Michael Giffney
- What is Telecom Expense Management?
- Telecom expense management pricing in Australia and New Zealand
- Carrier billing portal vs telecom expense management
- TEM Software (Self-Serve) or TEM Managed Service?
- Telecom cost optimisation
- Telecom governance, visibility and compliance
- Multi-carrier telecom management
Contact
For media enquiries, speaking requests or commentary on telecom, managed mobility and endpoint security in Australia and New Zealand, contact VoicePlus.
