<B>TechTalk</B>
<B>Expense Vendor Clarus Hit With Lawsuits</B>
At least 15 law firms have filed federal class action suits against Atlanta-based e-procurement firm Clarus Corp., which sells an expense management product called eXpense, after the company on Oct. 25 announced a higher than expected third-quarter loss of 54 cents per share. Clarus' stock dropped 44 percent the next trading day. Among other allegations, the suing law firms claimed certain Clarus managers issued misleading statements about the company's performance and took advantage of that for their own gain in insider trading. The plaintiffs alleged Clarus knew third-quarter earnings would miss estimates and failed to warn investors of that fact, instead selling "millions of dollars worth of their own personal holdings of Clarus stock," said one firm. "We intend to vigorously defend these suits and will seek their dismissal at the earliest possible opportunity," responded Steve Jeffery, chairman and CEO for Clarus. "The suits contain gross factual inaccuracies, which we will deal with in court."<A NAME="2">
<B>Concur Plans New Product Lines</B>
Redmond, Wash.-based Concur Technologies, which this week will announce September quarter earnings, is planning to address "what else is wrong with expense management," said executive vice president of marketing Raj Singh in an interview with BTN earlier this month. "We're talking about driving more value out of the data. We'll be announcing supplements to the expense product for data mining. We have 500 customers with a rich set of data, and we want to find out how we can make that information valuable to all our customers." Also, although the company characterized wireless as a lot of hype, Concur will partner for a wireless product by the middle of next year, Singh said. "Our customers have said they don't want us spending money on stuff they can't use and doing it for the value of a press release," he noted. "Nobody's going to use it and we all know it."<A NAME="3">
<B>U.S. Bank Partners For VAT Management</B>
U.S. Bank last month partnered with Seattle-based Corporate VAT Management to help its corporate clients recover foreign value-added taxes using CVM's three-month-old AutoVAT software. The software helps companies track their tax exposure using existing corporate card data and begins the process of automatically generating refund applications. U.S. Bank claimed to be the only U.S. corporate card issuer that "actively promotes" automated VAT recovery.<A NAME="4">
<B>Datalex, Atraxis Aim For Airline IT </B>
Dublin-based booking engine vendor Datalex PLC, an Orbitz vendor that has an alliance with Worldspan and has plans for a corporate booking tool, last month partnered with airline information technology supplier Atraxis to provide travel suppliers with e-distribution technology. Atraxis is a subsidiary of Swissair parent SAir Group. Datalex's Johan Van Wegen, recently appointed director of business development, will work with Atraxis to market Datalex products to current and future Atraxis clients. Like Worldspan, Atraxis recently invested in Datalex, which opened Oct. 20 on Nasdaq at $12 per share. The move comes at a time when Sabre is "working to get its house in order" on airline IT solutions, said CEO Bill Hannigan, and is rumored to be looking to sell that part of its business. Continuing to target small to medium-size carriers, however, Sabre on Nov.1 announced a new application service provider offering, eMergo, which over the next two years will offer 30 mostly Web-enabled applications for such needs as planning, operations and decision support. Sabre plans to invest about $40 million in eMergo. <A NAME="5">
<B>Galileo Selects JP Morgan For Sale/LBO</B>
Galileo International earlier this month took its first step in proceeding with a sale or leveraged buyout by selecting JP Morgan as an advisor. Galileo last month said the public market was not appropriately valuing the company.