Elance Solution Delivers Cost Savings, Compliance and Performance in Over 50 Service Categories.

Sunnyvale, CA – December 22, 2004 — Elance gathered more than 25 customers and industry thought-leaders, at its semi-annual Customer Advisory Council, to discuss the latest developments in Services Supply Management. Elance customers representing industries such as financial services, energy, utility, manufacturing and technology participated in two days of experience sharing, benchmarking and planning sessions.

The primary theme in the discussions was driving and measuring business results from the deployment of the Elance Enterprise application. Some participants in particularly competitive industries indicated that their efforts were focused on driving cost savings and that they were realizing hard dollar savings ranging from 5-15%, based on conservative estimates. Other participants, especially those in regulated industries, indicated their deployments were focused around improving compliance and described the dramatic reduction in non-compliant transactions. Another key topic of discussion was the standardization of service category definitions to ensure consistent measurement of supplier performance both within and across customer organizations.

Several sessions focused on the exchange of best practices and success stories around driving user and supplier adoption across multiple categories. Participants described how they have deployed Elance Enterprise in a wide variety of categories including marketing, consulting, print, offshore outsourcing, contingent labor, engineering, asset maintenance, human resources, advertising, transportation and over 50 other service categories. The attendees discussed approaches to maximizing adoption in the internal buyer and external supplier communities through planning, training and leveraging the usability of the Elance application. In aggregate, thousands of supplier companies and tens of thousands of individual contractors have been enabled and are using Elance Enterprise.

Guest speakers included industry practitioners such as Chris Allen, of 2nd Edison, and Todd Furniss, of the Everest Group. Allen highlighted the hidden cost of non-compliance for complex services by presenting examples from over 100 supplier compliance audits. Furniss highlighted the trends and best practices in ensuring effective governance of outsourcing relationships, distilled from over 350 client engagements.

Elance executives presented Elance's updated strategy and product roadmap and solicited customer input. "Elance customers are among the largest and best run companies in the world. We are pleased by the extensive deployments and committed to helping our customers throughout the deployment lifecycle," said Fabio Rosati, president and CEO of Elance. "Close collaboration with our customers and other industry practitioners in Services Supply Management is a critical component of Elance's strategy and commitment to thought leadership."

Elance Customer Advisory Council meetings are typically held at customer locations. This meeting was hosted at the offices of Texas Instruments in Dallas, TX. Elance's fourth and fifth Council meetings are scheduled for April 2005 and October 2005 respectively

About Elance, Inc.
Elance is the leading provider of software solutions for Services Supply Management (SSM) that improve the way companies buy and manage outsourced servicesone of the largest components of corporate spending. With the Elance Enterprise application suite, Global 2000 enterprises can reduce costs by 8-17%, improve service quality, ensure compliance and bring visibility and control to their services supply chain. Elance also provides Elance Online, a web-based solution that enables small- and medium-sized businesses to easily outsource projects to a global pool of high-quality service providers. For more information on Elance, please call 650-316-7500 or visit  www.elance.com.

# # #

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

Return To Press Releases