The company unveiled a partnership with Clarify in August (Aug. 30, p. 18; informationweek.com/750/asp. htm), but admits it spent about two months longer than anticipated on testing. "We've been trying to define the service offering, and it required a bit more work than we expected," says Dev Ittycheria, VP of ASP services for Breakaway. "Clarify had to figure out how it would recognize its revenue from a rented model; we had to figure out how to make the offering affordable and attractive to users."

Breakaway is offering the Clarify software via a pure rental model, charging from $80,000 to $100,000 for setup plus monthly per-seat usage fees. Ten seats cost about $7,000 monthly for a three-year license. A do-it-yourself implementation can cost $100,000 to $250,000 in license fees, not including additional IT support, and can take up to six months to deploy, compared with 30 to 90 days for ASPs.

Breakaway's push into the front-office market is a good first step, analysts say. But to continue to retain and attract ASP customers, it will need to add back-office enterprise resource planning solutions, says Asha May, an analyst for Dataquest. Rival Corio Inc. provides integrated PeopleSoft ERP and Siebel CRM applications and has enlisted two customers. Breakaway has yet to announce any Clarify customers.

Breakaway is offering the software bundled or as standalone modules, including customer support, contract management, sales-force automation, and quality process. Says Ittycheria: "One thing we learned during the test period is the users don't always want all the modules."