As we approach the five year anniversary of the end of the greatest bull market ever, it still confounds us how crazy valuations actually were back in March of 2000. Metrics were being created on the fly by analysts to justify price targets since traditional price-to-earnings and price-to-book ratios could not be determined without profits or tangible assets. Page views actually seemed like the perfect means to value shares of Yahoo (YHOO) to many people. After all, the company was an Internet portal, not an online store or auction site.

I was not immune to this either, of course. I recall a favorite metric of mine at the time was to look at relative price-to-sales ratios. If you had three companies in the same market, but one traded at 12x sales and the other two traded at 20x, you could pretty much assume that if you bought the cheaper one some analyst would come along and point out the "mis-pricing" and before you knew it your stock was fetching 20x as well.

I bring this up, not to blast buyers of Sirius at $9, Taser a $30, or Travelzoo at $100, but instead to point out that some of these profitless companies actually did survive. Most have changed business models (or businesses for that matter) several times since 2000, and very few have the same management teams in place. Those former Internet entrepreneurs have long since cashed in their stock options and left the spotlight.

An example of the aforementioned transformation is Ariba (ARBA). Now, Ariba has a special place in my heart. I never owned the stock, but I went to college with the daughter of one of the company's earliest employees. My discovery that my dorm room neighbor's dad had worked for and knew the company's co-founder and former CEO, Keith Krach, actually was the launching pad for our friendship.

How is this important, other than to rekindle my college memories and remind me that I haven't talked to that very friend in a couple of years? Well, it appears even though I missed out on the stock's tremendous run in 1999 and 2000, I may be getting a second chance to make money on the shares of the business-to-business software company. After hitting a high of more than $1,140 per share (split adjusted) five years ago, the stock currently trades at $8, down some 99.3 percent.

With $130 million in cash, no debt, and $360 million in sales expected in fiscal 2005 (ending September 30th), the stock looks very cheap. Ariba just completed the acquisition of Free Markets (another former Internet high-flier) and is in fact growing again. Net of cash, investors today are paying about $6.25 per share and 1.1x revenue for $0.35 in earnings per share in 2005 and $0.56 in 2006. If the company can indeed hit its numbers, there is little chance the stock will continue to trade at 11 times projected 2006 profits.