Geoffrey mentioned on the mailing list Peregrine Systems as a potential gorilla.
...which is the market leader in a category that has, I believe, a reasonable chance of tornadoing. The category is called asset management, and it focuses on the life cycle of an asset from acquisition (bumps up against Ariba and C1), maintenance (bumps up against help-desk apps like Remedy and Aristosoft - the latter acquired by IBM and then sold to Peregrine), and disposition (feed to used equipment exchanges, etc.). IT is the first adopter of the category for all the IT assets, but it expands into fleets of vehicles, real estate assets, etc. The one area that is not particularly economical to tackle is plant and equipment, as it does not replicate well across companies or even factories.
Peregrine, a $400M company with a multi-billion market cap, is, I believe, the market leader in this category, but they have complicated the investment thesis a bit by acquiring Harbinger, an old-world EDI company with new-world XML technology, as a platform for extending their value-add outside the firewall. I encourage the list to take a look at the whole category and report back.
Geoffrey
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