Clearway growing on new software IP

In the quiet town of Medfield, a 13-year-old company says it is about to change the way people handle information on their computers. To do so, it has more than doubled in size, spun off five subsidiaries and raised cash from one of the top-ranked golfers in the world — all in the last year.

Clearway Technology Partners Inc. was making a comfortable living for its employees — as well as CEO Kevin Cotter and president and COO Eugene Rodgers — as a consultancy focusing mostly on Microsoft Corp. solutions. But when a series of opportunities to acquire some intellectual property arose that would give the company its first software products on the market, Clearway jumped at the chance.

“We went from a services company to a services and software company. We know that they are two different models,” Cotter said.

Cotter, who was president at Aimnet Solutions and started Application Systems Group in 1987, and Rodgers, whose pedigree goes back to the inventors of the Internet, certainly had the experience to add software sales to the mix. But the profitable firm didn’t have the extra capital lying around.

Enter the world’s No. 10-ranked golfer, Ireland’s Padraig Harrington. Cotter and Rodgers said that Harrington is both a hands-off private investor and a willing participant in the company’s marketing efforts, having spoken before at Clearway client meetings.

With the funding in hand, Clearway bought the so-called game-changer IP from former Digital Equipment Corp. marketing consultant and former Boston College football star Tony Sukiennik, who had been working on the concept for six years at his now-defunct startup Infogenome LLC.

That IP has been spun out into Clearway Insight, and its software will launch this summer, first in a free consumer version.

The software enables the user to save anything he runs across while using his computer and automatically creates links with other related content to enable users to share their content with other Insight customers. It also allows users to pull various elements together into a structured format and publish it like a blog. But the potential killer app is the search function that would possibly cut down search times by as much as 20 percent, Cotter said.

One of the reasons they say the demand for a partner to buy into the product will be so great is because it will allow for ad targeting based on the stored and connected content, not just random search terms.

After the consumer version comes a corporate version for which will they will charge an as-yet undetermined amount, and which will be completely locked down within a corporate firewall for security purposes.

Now at 100 employees, Clearway thinks that it might need to reach 300 across all subsidiaries in one year’s time. To handle the anticipated massive traffic from the planned 2 gigabytes of storage Insight will give each user, the company is building a data center in Hyderabad, India, that will be launched in about 30 days, the company said.

Cotter and Rodgers are not shy about their claims for Insight.

“Whoever we embrace with this is going to have a much better position in the browser wars,” Rodgers said. He specifically targeted Google Inc.’s much-hyped and much-condemned Wave content sharing application.

“We think we can kill Wave,” he said.