Vitria became one of the most valuable software stocks of the dot-com boom by getting old computer systems to talk to each other. Large companies ran dozens of separate systems for orders, billing, inventory and customers, and those systems rarely shared anything. Vitria made software to connect them and move the work between them. When it filed to go public in the fall of 1999, companies were rushing to link their old systems to the web.

BusinessWare and Messaging

JoMei Chang and Dale Skeen founded Vitria in 1994, drawing on Skeen's work in messaging systems. They bet that a company's processes, as well as its data, needed to flow across systems. Vitria's BusinessWare platform passed events between applications and modeled each step of a business process. An order could move from website to warehouse to invoice automatically. Telecom and finance were early markets.

Taken Private by Its Founders

Vitria priced at $16 a share in September 1999 and soon became a boom favorite. Its sales fell as spending on integration dropped after 2000, and bigger vendors moved into its market. The founders stayed in charge the whole time. In 2007 they took Vitria private through a company they controlled. That ended its life as a public company, more than seven years after the offering.

Cover: Lilies (Corey Memorial Window), Louis Comfort Tiffany. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a stained glass window (vitrum, glass; many panes joined into one).