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Elance Announces Results of Survey Investigating Fortune 1000 Services Purchasing Practices.
Sunnyvale, CA, December 22, 2004 - Elance, Inc. today announced results of a survey on external services and outsourcing trends at Fortune 1000 companies. A majority of respondents (77%) expected their use of outsourced services to increase over the next two years. More than half (55%) claimed only "low" to "average" visibility into services performance and spending by their organizations. Over two-thirds (68%) reported that buyers of these services were well distributed throughout their organizations, without centralized control. At the top of the list of most commonly outsourced service categories were Facilities, IT, Marketing and Print, Temporary Labor, Maintenance Services and Call Center Operations."Results from the survey clearly demonstrate that services are widely outsourced, that spending on services is expected to grow, and that lack of visibility is leading to unnecessary spending, disappointing performance and weak compliance," commented Beerud Sheth, founder and vice president of marketing for Elance. "Tools for services supply management have matured and been market tested to the point where they deliver significant value rapidly. Companies that invest in tools and strategies to address this critical need will realize significant competitive advantage over those that maintain the troubling status quo described by these survey results."
The survey, which concluded in November 2004, was sponsored by Elance and conducted by Gatepoint Research. Ninety-eight percent of respondents represented Fortune 1000 companies and 80% were senior decision makers with C-level, senior vice president and vice president titles. Respondents represented a wide range of functional responsibilities including finance, purchasing, operations, administration and technology.
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 services-one 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.
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Elance, Elance Enterprise and Elance Online are trademarks or registered trademarks of Elance, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

