Clearwater Technology Case

Clearwater Technologies

Clearwater Technologies, Inc. was a small, publicly traded technology firm outside Boston. It was founded by four MIT graduates. They saw an opportunity in a market and felt that they could run a company that could meet the needs of a market that larger firms ignored. Clearwater Technologies was the leader in customer relationship management servers for sales forces of small-to medium-sized companies.

The product they were selling was called QTX. It was a sales support server that would allow more than one user to maintain their sales account databases at the same time. Clearwater Technologies customers typically were those who needed less than a 30 seat server. The company had many strengths. One of their strengths was that they customized the QTX for companies that needed a 10 to 30 seat server. This is a strength because their competitor is not doing this. Another strength was that the company used value added resellers to sell its product though. This reduced their sales and service expense and increased their market coverage. The company's weakness was that it could not accommodate more that 30 seats at a server which meant that they lost our on customers looking for a larger seating capacity. One opportunity the company has would be to sell its product completely through a value added reseller. This would allow them to focus more on the product design and possible consider offer a larger seating capacity system in the future. The threat comes from its only competitors in its small to medium sized market. Oracle and SAP systems competed with the QTX system in this market. They can be considered a threat even though the QTX system was superior because they are competing for the same clients.

The company had a yearly sales of about 4000 units combing all sales from 10 to 30 seat products. I think they should enter into a larger market with 30 plus seating. One disadvantage of entering a new market would be competing with already well established competitors. An advantage would be seeing more clients and be able to cater to larger companies. I think Clearwater Technologies would continue their success, even in a larger market.