Aprimo Makes Marketing Modular

Aprimo is responding to enterprises' need to spend less and see a faster return on their marketing-management investments by making available today functionality in Aprimo Marketing 5.5 in a modular licensing program. Analysts have chastised Aprimo in the past for its traditional high price tag on its marketing-management applications. "Their average deal size is $500,000, and for managed marketing solutions they're getting up to $1 million," says Ian Jacobs, enterprise software analyst at analysis firm the451. Aprimo, which helps enterprises manage their marketing initiatives, focuses on four states of marketing expenditure, including budget, forecasted expense, committed expense, and actual expense. A mix of software and services, the now-modular offerings include marketing planning, expense management, job initiation and production management, campaign management, dialogue management, event management, and lead management capabilities. The seven modular capabilities are aimed at improving financial visibility, reducing campaign cycle times, accelerating customer acquisition, and improving customer retention. "In today's economy companies are focused on very rapid deployments with minimal deployment costs and quick return on their investment," says Joe Meyer, vice president of marketing at Aprimo. The news benefits Aprimo as organizations gear up for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which requires financial executives to be personally responsible for accounting efforts. The act, administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is designed to protect against accounting errors and fraudulent procedures in the workplace. Industry pundits have already dubbed Sarbanes-Oxley the new Y2K, because of its hard-and-fast deadline requiring most large U.S. companies to comply by June 15, 2004. Small firms and foreign private companies have until April 15, 2005, to comply with the new regulations. Aprimo Marketing's Financial Manager helps organizations get a better handle on accounting by helping companies track forecast, committed, and actual costs at any budgetary level to get the most granular financial details. "We're uniquely positioned to address financial management issues, including the ability to audit trails and other issues for systems compliance and reporting compliance," Meyer says.