Alinean and LRWA Launch Netherlands IT Value Practice

Introduces Alinean Investment Decision Support Tools to Europe

ORLANDO, Fla. (October 5, 2005) — Alinean, Inc., the market-leading provider of IT benchmarking and ROI measurement tools, today announced a partnership with LRWA, an IT investment consultancy based in the Netherlands, where LRWA is providing a long-awaited service to the Western European IT community. LRWA is using Alinean’s tools to offer a unified system to measure the economic value of IT investments and align these investments with business objectives.

“In the past, LRWA provided ad hoc consulting for the measurement of IT value. We are happy to introduce our clients to an enterprise platform that can provide IT investment decisions,” said Liesbeth Ruoff, CEO and founder of LRWA. “The Alinean team has been providing world-class tools for the IT community for years and its availability will be beneficial to our customers.”

In the late 1990s, Europe did not catch the American IT spending habits and had been more cautious to adopt new technology. European companies have always required accountability for IT investments, whether technology oriented, such as a server consolidation or business focused, on CRM software. Over the last three years, LRWA has been limited to IT investment decision tools that are project centric.

The Alinean ROI Analyst™ Enterprise framework has enabled LRWA to analyze quicker and scale the measurement practice across the business without distracting IT or the business units from the day-to-day function. Alinean’s approach delivers significant benefits for LRWA’s customers, including faster turnaround and much greater reliability. For European CIOs, reliability is important. The IT strategy and results can be supported with Alinean tools.

“For the CIO, there are two primary motivations to implementing IT value measurement software,” said Michael Friedlander, vice president of business development with Alinean. “The first is associated with cost savings, moving from a system that’s depleting cash to a more efficient, less expensive system. The second is to align the business value with the objectives of the IT investment. LRWA has been able to successfully demonstrate both to European CIOs.”

Although both motivations are economically rational, Alinean has found that the businesses that seek alignment of IT and business value have a better rate of success in implementing IT value management. The whole concept of treating IT assets as an accountable resource is absolutely mandatory in today’s economy where IT expenditures can easily account for 12 percent of an organization’s entire budget.

The ROI Analyst™ Enterprise framework is available from LRWA in Western Europe this month.

About LRWA IT Investment Consultancy
LRWA IT Investment Consultancy was founded in order to enable its clients to prove and improve the value of IT investments by doing more with less through facilitating communications between IT and business unit stakeholders. LRWA governs on the following practices; 1) make the right decision by measuring all the relevant costs and benefits of an IT investment; 2) quantify the value of IT investments by independent research validation; 3) position IT investments by revealing its true business value and; 4) provide objective, independent advice on optimization of the IT project portfolio.
Founded in 2003 to align IT investments with business value and works, LRWA works with companies such as SAP, Deloitte, Erasmus Medical Centrum, Randstad and Unisys. For more information visit www.lrwa.nl or call +31(0)70 387 2961.

About Alinean

Alinean develops software and solutions to streamline the B2B selling process with business value selling solutions – using ROI/TCO and business case analysis to prove and improve the value of solutions to prospects and customers. The company’s founding team pioneered the concept of interactive ROI and TCO software in 1994, developing award-winning solutions for leading B2B vendors and consultants. Its research methodologies and software tools are used by analyst firms and consultancies such as IDC and B2B leaders such as Oracle, HP, Dell, SAP, Microsoft, Symantec and IBM, and have helped justify billions of dollars in IT spending and derived value. For more information, visit www.alinean.com or call 407.382.0005.
 

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