So confident of its future is extranet and integration company Click Interactive Inc that it has turned away all offers of partnership – of which it’s had many and accepted precisely none – preferring instead to cherry pick its route to new markets. The Chicago, Illinois company, which dismisses Open Market, IBM and SAP e-business suites as predominantly retail or catalog applications rather than business-to-business solutions, says it’s currently in negotiation to allow one of the large systems integrators carry its product, Click Commerce. Rather than throwing a packaged application over the wall a la Open Market or IBM and expecting the customer to do the work, Click acts as an integrator, tying in business and application logic from existing stock control, ordering, parts management, sales order, order checking and other systems and putting it up on an extranet, linking a company with its suppliers, distributors and customers. Written in C, it uses HTML templates, ActiveX, runs mostly on Windows NT – though also supports Unix – supports eight European languages and currencies and has an average install price of $500,000. Forecasting revenue of $100m in 1999, the 1994 start-up claims to be profitable, has no debt, is running on the cash it generates and has taken money from no-one, yet. However it is now seeking a strategic partner and funding to help it expand beyond the manufacturing sector it exclusively services at present into healthcare and mobile markets. It will also begin marketing a packaged version of its software in the third quarter.
Strategic bedfellow
Click makes its money by building extranets on top of ERP solutions such as SAP, Baan and PeopleSoft. It works in conjunction with a variety of third-party web and internet products ranging from firewalls to product configuration tools; it’ll integrate with whatever solutions a customer prefers, it says. It expects to have a strategic bedfellow by year-end. The forthcoming 3.0 release of its product includes additional support for Windows CE and it’s looking at how it might be able to use NexTel’s new data packet network in the US. Click doesn’t think big companies are ready to unleash Java into their mission- critical ERP systems yet which is why it’s hanging off doing a Java version of Click Commerce until enterprise Java beans becomes better established or someone pays it a lot of money to do a re-write. The company, which employs 40 staff – a third of them technical – say it has no plans to go to the market why should we need to join this crazy rush? it asks.
