Why Do It Yourself?

It's easy to see why people take on more than they can manage, for the sake of doing things their way. In fact, I hear daily anecdotes about solution providers who were forced to solve a problem with a custom workaround and are looking for ways to market and resell their own preassembled, preintegrated solution to solving a particular problem. This sort of thing will increasingly become the lifeblood of the channel.

It was certainly the impetus behind the rise of Alinean, a Orlando, Fla.-based vendor that has developed a toolkit dubbed ValueIT that solution providers and consultants can use to assess the return on investment associated with various IT initiatives or specific applications. The product, which shipped late last year, got its start in life as a series of custom projects that Alinean President and CEO Tom Pisello did for both high-tech vendors and various consulting and systems-integration firms. ValueIT contains templates that walk you through various scenarios,from analyzing a CRM implementation to consolidating storage. The toolkit costs anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 to implement and can then be resold to customers.

Congruity, one of Pisello's early resellers in the Cleveland area, considered constructing a similar service from scratch before connecting with Alinean, Congruity CEO Mike Ciana said. "When we first started this, we thought about building the tool ourselves, but we knew we had to keep things streamlined," he said.

Speaking of solutions, now seems like a great time to plug a contest being run by the CRN Test Center. You'll all agree that the existing antispam solutions leave much to be desired. If you think your approach to this problem is superior, our engineers would love to test it. Apply now online at www.crn.com/spam. Who knows, you could find yourself like Alinean, selling other solution providers an integrated solution that is equal parts technology and experience.

HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, would appreciate your thoughtful e-mail at [email protected].