New board trying to sell Clarus Corp.

It took a nasty proxy fight and some harsh words in public documents to elect a trio of dissident Clarus Corp. shareholders to the struggling company's board of directors.

Now it will likely take just a few more months for these new Clarus directors and other top management to either liquidate or sell the Suwanee-based e-procurement software company (Nasdaq: CLRS).

Clarus directors recently hired U.S. Bancorp's financial services division, Piper Jaffray, to sell the business, said Warren B. Kanders, an independent investor who was one of the three dissident shareholders recently elected to the Clarus board.

Kanders said Clarus executives already have started to prepare the company for a sale. For example, they trimmed its work force in July from 80 employees to about 50. Many of those cut were in sales or administration.

"I think you can infer that the people we are talking to already have the sales efforts and infrastructures in place so that they can absorb all of this," Kanders said in a recent telephone interview from his Connecticut office. "It was appropriate to make those reductions given the types of buyers that we are talking to."

Like many other struggling or failed dot-coms, Clarus jumped into the limelight in the late 1990s as company executives tried to nab a portion of the tens of millions of extra dollars large corporations were spending on technology upgrades.

One application software analyst for Banc of America Securities LLC believes many small companies in the highly competitive e-commerce sector found themselves in a similar position when the economy began to sour.

"This wasn't about any particular company's specific failure, it was about a spending bubble that popped," said Bob Austrian, who follows e-commerce trends. "These companies filled a shortterm need, and the demand for their products went from unprecedented strength to unprecedented weakness."

Clarus stock is now trading at $4 to $5 per share, a couple of dollars above historical lows.

That's a far cry from the $136 Clarus stock traded...