This just in: measuring ASP ROI before signing a contract more than possible. It's actually pretty easy.
Like Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible films, we at searchServiceProvider assumed calculating ROI would be time-consuming, ambiguous and end with many unanswered questions. A recent briefing with Bedford, N.H.-based mid-market ASP ManagedOps.com proved us wrong.
Product marketing manager Chuck Milliken showed us ManagedOps' secret ROI calculator. To use it we thought we'd have to repel into a temperature-sensitive, laser-guarded computer chamber, but much to our relief, Milliken simply opened a spreadsheet.
As we learned, a customer -- who may not know which ROI questions to ask -- can plug costs and man-hours required for such tasks as preparing existing systems, implementing new hardware and software and training workers, and compare them side-by-side with ManagedOps costs.
Said Milliken, "The end result is a print out that they can walk around with, and then from that the company can determine whether or not to outsource."
Kathy Wrobel, vice president of finance and administration for ManagedOps customer Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass., said she had performed her own ROI analysis, but by using ManagedOps tool learned that an ASP could save her organization an extra $30,000 annually.
"We can give out three and a half more scholarships for that savings," said Wrobel. "We can help three more kids to go school."
What's the lesson here? Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) should seek out providers offering easy-to-understand ROI tools, confirmed Jennifer Lackey, associate research consultant with Portland, Ore.-based research firm Zanthus.
Lackey said SMBs' finance and technical staffs should use such tools together to obtain the most accurate results possible. On the other hand she said enterprise customers should not be as concerned with having an ROI tool provided for them, because their finances are more complex.
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