Clarify Inc is the latest arrival on the turnkey customer service management scene, a firm cut from the same cloth as ProActive Software Inc, Scopus Technology Inc and Aurum Software Inc, a noticeably popular fashion in start-ups this season. Clarify, however, is positioning itself against the others as the most haute couture of the breed, the kind of house that could easily mushroom into a $100m enterprise in just a few years. The business is the brainchild of chief executive officer, David Stamm, a co-founder of Daisy Systems Inc and the Intel Corp veteran who designed the first single-chip 8-bit microcontroller. With Stamm acting as chief engineer, the San Jose, California start-up has been readying its line for the last two years financed by a $3.5m first-round investment from venture capitalists Institutional Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Menlo Ventures. Though it says it still has $1m in the bank, it is currently out for a second round, believed to be in the neighbourhood of $4.5m, which would make it the most heavily backed venture in the field. It ascribes that fact to the scarcity of potential $100m niches right now. With its packages yet to hit the street, Clarify figures its technology will cop the leadership position. It reckons its nearest competitor is AST, a successful pioneer whose big iron software is less appealing in these days of client-server machines. Lower down the totem pole is ProActive, the Roger Sippl start-up, whose offerings and style of market entry Clarify derides as dribbleware. Below ProActive are Scopus and then Aurum, each increasingly limited in expertise and scope. Clarify can immediately lay claim to the widest breadth of hardware since it runs client-server fashion on MS-DOS machines, Macs and Unix workstations supporting Windows, MacOS and Motif, all in native mode, along with Sybase. Support for Oracle and other databases will follow next year.
Post-It Note
Clarify is also more tightly focused than the rest, targeting the computer industry itself as its initial customer base, pursuing hardware, software, networking, telecommunications, test equipment and medical systems suppliers that desperately need to improve the home-grown support offered their customers (very often dependent on the ubiquitous yellow Post-It Note) and realise this issue is increasingly becoming a vendor selection mechanism as well as a revenue generator. Eschewing a broad-based beta test programme, Clarify went instead with only two sites, both willing to pay and give Clarify the kind of corporate committment needed to validate the concept. They are Silicon Graphics Inc and Xyplex Inc. Both are replacing minicomputer-based systems with Clarify’s ClearSupport technical support management system, shipping this month. Next month Clarify will add its ClearQuality defect tracking system and in the first quarter ClearLogistics, a field service and inventory management system intended to support companies with hundreds of engineers, thousands of customer calls a week and millions of dollars of field service inventory. Silicon Graphics, which Dataquest ranks as first in service among workstation vendors already, is also beta testing the latter. The user-tailorable technology offers workflow management and a proprietary knowledge-sharing case history-oriented Diagnostic Engine using keyword search and case-based reasoning for identifying and matching problems and solutions. It can be integrated with third-party finance and manufacturing systems, the company says. Clarify estimates its immediate universe at 331,000 terminals and will be selling direct. A typical ClearSupport configuration averages out at $5,000 per concurrent user, which includes the database licences. ClearQuality will average $4,000 per concurrent user. ClearLogistics has no price yet.
