Alinean Partners

Alinean has formed several strategic partnerships to expand our knowledge base and total service offering. These relationships bring value-added research, resources and industry-specific experience to each of our clients' projects.

• IDC

• Wipro

• brainshark

• Legacy Solutions

• salesforce.com

• LRWA IT Investment Consultancy

• Hemscott, Inc.  (Data Provider)

IDC is the foremost global market intelligence and advisory firm helping clients gain insight into technology and e-business trends to develop sound business strategies. Using a combination of rigorous primary research, in-depth analysis, and client interaction, IDC forecasts worldwide markets and trends to deliver dependable service and client advice. More than 700 analysts in 43 countries provide global research with local content. IDC's customers comprise the world's leading IT suppliers, IT organizations, e-business companies, and the financial community. Additional information can be found at www.idc.com.

IDC is a division of IDG, the world's leading IT media, research, and exposition company.

THE PARTNERSHIP

IDC has formed a marketing partnership with Alinean to create and jointly develop a comprehensive Business Value Selling Program. Available to IT solution providers, the Business Value Selling Program offers a complete financial selling toolkit. The toolkit will include IDC Research and White Papers, a Business Value Selling Enablement Program for sales professionals, ROI Go-to-Market campaigns, and a comprehensive Business Value Selling Toolset.

Wipro's Global Product Strategy and Architecture (PSA) Practice, the research, business value and market strategy consultancy group within Wipro Technologies (NYSE:WIT), has more than fourteen years of experience in researching, analyzing, and documenting the business value of technology solutions. Wipro's PSA Practice assists technology vendors, service providers and enterprises in developing innovative and effective product and IT strategies that enable them to expand their market opportunities, extend their competitive advantage and optimize their business operations. They work with many of the leading and emerging IT vendors around the world in developing successful product architectures and market strategies. A key reason that the PSA Practice has sustained over 60% year to year growth is that it offers clients unique insights from Wipro's Telecommunications and Product Engineering (TPE) Business, the world's largest professional services R&D and engineering organization, coupled with seasoned PSA consultants and technical architects who have practical hands-on experience that informs their business analysis work.

THE PARTNERSHIP

Wipro PSA and Alinean have announced a far-reaching strategic alliance to develop competitive Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)-based business value selling solutions for IT vendors and solution providers. The combination of Wipro's expertise in performing unbiased competitive TCO research with Alinean's world-class sales tools will enable IT product vendors to obtain comprehensive third-party validated customized TCO justifications - allowing their customers, prospects, partners, and sales and consulting professionals to easily quantify the TCO advantage of the IT vendors' products.

The Wipro-Alinean TCO solution will consist of Alinean on-demand TCO calculators available via vendor websites and to partner/sales professionals, populated with data and metrics collected via Wipro's research. TCO calculators will be accompanied by Wipro-developed research and methodology white papers, case studies and educational programs to help prospects understand the unbiased research and attention to detail that constitutes the metrics, tools and results. This combined offering of Wipro's research expertise and Alinean's sales tools is unrivaled.

Brainshark is the leader in on-demand business communication solutions. Their patented software empowers any business person to easily create, deliver and track high-impact voice-enriched presentations, available on demand. More than 600 companies - including a third of the Fortune 100 - rely on Brainshark software and services to accelerate training, increase marketing response rates, shorten the sales cycle, or enhance corporate communication. Provided on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis, Brainshark solutions can be ramped up quickly for rapid return on investment.

THE PARTNERSHIP

Alinean has partnered with Brainshark to help B2B organizations improve sales effectiveness by integrating Brainshark's on-demand communication capabilities into Alinean's ROI/TCO business case proposals. By leveraging the power of Brainshark, Alinean customers can quickly and easily enrich their business case presentations with voice annotation to clearly explain results and highlight key findings, as well as track viewing and reach of the presentation once its delivered - understanding who within the prospect has viewed the presentation, where they focused their time, and adjust future revisions accordingly.

Existing Brainshark customers can take advantage of special pricing from Alinean to create customized business value selling campaigns and tools. Current Alinean customers can now choose to add-on Brainshark functionality to further achieve the benefits of business value selling - shortening sales cycles, increasing deal size, reducing discounts and improving competitive advantage.

As well, Brainshark has launched a Business Value Assessment program for their own sales force, using Alinean tools to quantify the business value if their on-demand communication solutions.

    Legacy Solutions Website »      Press Release »

Legacy Solutions helps enterprises make smarter telecommunication decisions. The company provides a comprehensive suite of professional services that address the challenges enterprises face in securing best-in-class contracts and optimal cost management practices. It is recognized as one of the few companies in the country qualified to evaluate the business value of VoIP migrations and establish the business processes required to control successful implementations. Founded in 2003 by a 20-year AT&T executive, the Legacy Solutions team is comprised of Telecommunications Senior Executives, Managers, Financial Architects, Solutions Architects and Professional Negotiators from the leading global telecommunications company.

Specializing in the elements that comprise the life cycle events of telecommunications expense management, Legacy Solutions provides assessment of needs, inventory management methodology, investment evaluation, sourcing strategies, contract negotiations and contract management. Legacy's carrier veterans have hundreds of years of collective experience from both the supplier and buyer perspective and deliver outstanding results for even the most daunting enterprise challenges.

THE PARTNERSHIP

Alinean's collaboration with Legacy Solutions increases our research and knowledge base in the telecommunications industry, helping to provide more in-depth business value assessments for our customers as our analyses apply to their telecom needs.

Under the terms of the agreement, Legacy Solutions will work with Alinean in support of existing and new projects, helping to develop metrics and models for IT vendor telecommunication clients. Legacy Solution's research and content will be used to help Alinean develop tools to justify investments in unified communications, VoIP, Contact Center, Virtual Private Networking, Hybrid and Hosted solutions as well as other emerging telecommunication solutions.

      Hemscott Data Website »

Hemscott, Inc. is a leading independent provider of financial data in the U.S. and Canada. For over 30 years, they have delivered detailed numerical, statistical and general business information to their clients to help them meet their analytical, compliance and research needs. Hemscott, Inc. was previously known as CoreData and changed its name in March 2005.

Hemscott, Inc. serves the information needs of a broad range of sophisticated users including financial institutions, major corporations, financial websites, applications service providers and data redistributors. They are known throughout the business information industry for our data quality, timely information and flexible licensing terms.

THE PARTNERSHIP

Alinean has partnered with Hemscott to provide weekly, automated updates to Alinean's Value Base™ - the most comprehensive database designed specifically for IT solution provider sales, marketing and consulting teams.  This current financial data includes  updates spending metrics and corporate financial performance for over 21,400 worldwide public companies in a detailed IT spending assessment.

salesforce.com website »
Salesforce.com builds and delivers customer relationship management (CRM) applications on demand via its Web services platform. The salesforce.com product suite - Team Edition, Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, Wireless Edition, and Offline Edition - gives companies of all sizes a complete 360-degree view of the customer. The company's award-winning CRM solutions provide integrated online sales force automation, customer service and support management, and marketing automation applications to help companies meet the complex challenges of global customer communication.

THE PARTNERSHIP

Alinean has integrated key business value selling applications as part of the Salesforce.com AppExchange on-demand suite. If you are a salesforce.com user you can easily license and integrate Alinean business value selling applications into your CRM environment.

LRWA Website »     Press Release »

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.

THE PARTNERSHIP

Alinean has partnered with LRWA, who 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.

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.