Breakaway Solutions Inc. Delivers Clarify Applications

Breakaway Solutions Inc. is starting to deliver on its promise, announced in August, to offer Clarify customer- relationship management and sales-force automation applications. "[The deal] required 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, and we had to figure out how to make the offering affordable and attractive to the end user."

Breakaway is offering customers a pure-rental model for the software, allowing them to pay $80,000 to $100,000 in implementation fees and a per seat/per month fee thereafter. Ten seats will cost about $7,000 per month for a three-year license. A typical Clarify implementation can take up to six months to deploy and can cost between $100,000 to $250,000 in license fees when a customer implements it on its own, says Ittycheria.

Breakaway is offering the software in bundled packages, or as standalone modules. The initial offering will include applications for customer support, contract management, sales force automation, and quality. A buyout clause lets customers buy the software license from Breakaway at the end of the contract.

Analysts say Breakaway's push into the front-office market is a necessary one, but to continue to retain and attract ASP customers, the vendor will need to add more back office ERP solutions to the mix. "Eventually customers will demand a more complete solution that incorporates both front-office and back-office," says Asha May, an analyst for Dataquest.