Crimson Consulting Group Releases Study Of Online Exchange Marketplace With Focus On Opportunities For Technology Providers

Crimson Consulting Group, Inc. announced today the availability of a just-released study and a new practice area focused on helping technology vendors succeed in the emerging online exchange marketplace. Crimson's report "Realizing the Potential of Online Exchanges - Opportunities for Technology and Solution Providers," outlines the critical infrastructure, functionality, and scalability requirements technology vendors must address to enable the exchanges to provide buyers and sellers with fully integrated services.

Crimson Consulting Group, Inc. has conducted research on more than 700 online exchanges to learn more about the process of deploying an online exchange and selecting a technology platform. The study identifies five critical requirements for success based on the evaluation of business models, technology infrastructures, and partnership alliances and interviews with management of some of the largest online exchanges and their technology providers. This analysis, as well as Crimson's experience during the course of their consulting engagements in the online exchange domain, has given it an in-depth understanding of the market structure and its dynamics.

The online exchange practice, now offered by Crimson, supports Internet market makers, software vendors, hardware vendors, and application service providers. Crimson provides critical expertise for clients to position themselves and develop strategies for success in one of the most dynamic markets yet. The company provides critical knowledge of how technology-purchasing decisions are made, exchanges' technology needs, service acceptance paths and lifecycles to make client services, products, and solutions the basis for successful market entry. Crimson identifies the fundamental hurdles online exchanges must overcome and what technology providers can do to reap significant revenue in this space. Crimson customers are already welcoming the benefits of the new practice area.

"Crimson provided helpful insights into the online business-to-business market, and they did it quickly," said Dermot Duggan, Director eMarkets for Sun Microsystems. "Their approach included subject-matter expertise, and in-depth, custom research."

Customers are offered both a high-level view of the online exchange industry and an in-depth understanding of the opportunities to accelerate market penetration, grow market share, and gain adoption as a market standard.

"Technology providers that understand how online exchanges make technology purchase decisions have the opportunity to create a compelling strategy for targeting exchanges and realizing significant revenue and profits," said Glenn Gow, President and CEO of Los Altos-based Crimson Consulting. "We are convinced that while online exchanges can provide enormous value, few exchanges have realized their potential," Gow said. "Insufficient functionality, lack of automation and integration, concerns about scalability, and the presence of legacy EDI systems all preclude full participation by a critical mass of buyers and sellers. Technology providers that can solve these problems and help online exchanges realize their full value will reap enormous rewards."

About Crimson Consulting Group, Inc.

Crimson specializes in marketing for technology, e-commerce and Internet companies. With more than 2,400 consultants, the company provides strategic and implementation-level consulting for companies such as AOL, Cisco, HP, IBM, Lucent, Microsoft, Nortel, Oracle, Palm, and Sun Microsystems, as well as many emerging companies. For results of the Online Exchange study and more information on Crimson's marketing services, visit the Crimson web site at www.crimson-consulting.com, or contact the company at info@crimson-consulting.com or call (650) 960-3600, ext. 113.