Determine Your Own ROI

Ever wish you had your own ROI genie, providing objective analysis? Now you can, thanks to Evolve Software Inc.'s third-party business partner program, announced yesterday, which enables consultants, value added resellers, independent software vendors, and developers to sell Evolve's service delivery automation software. Some CRM consultants say vendor-supplied ROI calculators can be skewed to favor the vendor, naturally yielding less than objective results. Therefore, Evolve is empowering corporate decision makers to gain objective return on investment analysis for projects from internal IT departments and service organizations. Calculating a return on a technology investment makes sense for technology buyers scared by mounting CRM failure rates. According to the Gartner Group, by 2004, 50 percent of Fortune 1000 corporate IT departments will deploy such applications to increase internal business process efficiencies, particularly for measuring their own ROI. IDC expects the market to grow at 27.4 percent annually and top $6.8 billion by 2006, making it one of the fastest growing within the overall applications sector. "It is clear that service-based organizations and departments are in need of a solution that provides demonstrable improvements to the business processes surrounding the management and delivery of services, similar to what traditional ERP has done for the manufacturing industry," said Ted Kempf, principal analyst with industry consulting firm GartnerGroup. "For years the IT market has focused on bringing operational efficiencies to virtually every sector of the enterprise except those sectors responsible for services. Today this is changing." Some of the benefits of the Evolve software suite include project planning and prioritization, resource utilization and demand forecasting, career planning to develop valuable skills and retain top talent - all with an eye on return on investments. The solution helps technology executives integrate people and projects, and map these to corporate strategy. "Evolve's Business Partner Program lets partners join forces with a proven market leader to generate business and increase profits," said Tim Cannon, Evolve vice president, business development. "Through our program, Evolve and our partners can quickly identify and assess joint value propositions and take advantage of new opportunities." Some of the third-party companies that have already agreed to participate in the business partner program include LaVista Consulting, Intellilink Solutions, True Solutions Inc., EPI-USE, and TechSpan, Inc., a Goldman Sachs funded systems integration company.