Sunnyvale, CA – May 3, 2004 — Elance, Inc. today announced that GE is deploying the Elance SPM 4™ services procurement and management (SPM) application to streamline aspects of buying and managing services—including sourcing, procuring, managing suppliers and engagements, invoicing and analytical reporting—across a wide variety of business units.

GE is deploying Elance SPM 4 with the intent to manage approximately $1.5 billion in third-party services in categories such as temporary labor, IT consulting and engineering services, across several of its business units. Following these initial deployments, GE intends to roll out the multicurrency version of the software to additional business units in the US and the UK and will later evaluate the global roll out of multilingual, localized versions of Elance SPM.

"GE is well known as a leader in the application of technology to support enterprise-wide business initiatives," said Fabio Rosati, president and CEO of Elance. "By digitizing the company's services procurement and management processes, GE can gain visibility and control over services spend, improve productivity by automating the end-to-end process of services procurement, and realize significant cost savings by ensuring that services purchases comply with negotiated contract rates."

The Growing Need for Services Procurement and Management Solutions
Elance's enterprise SPM solutions address an increasingly critical need in corporations today-managing service-related expenditures. Recently published research by Elance and the Center for Advanced Purchasing Studies reveals that more than one-third of today's corporate purchasing budgets are spent on services-averaging almost one billion dollars annually in the typical Global 2000 corporation. To remain competitive in today's global economy, companies increasingly rely on external service suppliers and contract staff to provide a wide variety of mission-critical functions.

Elance SPM 4 is an integrated application suite for services procurement and management that automates and streamlines the end-to-end process of buying and managing all types of outsourced services and other non-catalog purchases. Architected for the unique needs of services, Elance SPM 4 enables organizations to gain visibility into services spend and supplier performance, establish and control enterprise processes, and achieve 10-20% hard cost savings across a broad variety of service categories.

About Elance, Inc.
Elance is the leading provider of software solutions for Services Procurement and Management (SPM) that improve the way organizations buy and manage services - one of the largest components of corporate spending. With the Elance SPM 4™ application suite, large organizations can gain visibility into services spend and performance, establish and control enterprise processes, and achieve 10-20% hard cost savings across a broad range of external service categories. Elance also provides the Elance Online™ services marketplace, the leading Web-based project marketplace that connects small- and medium-sized businesses with a global pool of high-quality service providers. For more information on Elance, please call 650-316-7500 or visit www.elance.com.

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Elance, Elance SPM 4 and Elance Online are trademarks or registered trademarks of Elance, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

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