Back during the dot-com boom, wild fortunes were made overnight as inventors of a new type of Web site got a cut of the action for bringing together buyers and sellers. Auto industry giants GM and DaimlerChrysler were awed, and jealous — didn’t they buy billions of dollars worth of supplier parts every year? Why couldn’t they run a business-to-business auction site for the car industry?

And so in 1999 the big automakers founded Detroit-based Covisint with much fanfare. But there was open dread from their suppliers, who worried about how a forced march to online auctions would squeeze their thin margins even more.

Dispensing contracts to e-commerce high-fliers of the time, such as the now-defunct Commerce One, Covisint struggled to set up an online auction, with bickering among software suppliers and automakers pulling down the effort.

By the time the bubble burst, Covisint was destined to ditch Commerce One and sell off what little there was of the auction assets to competitor FreeMarkets (which was sold to Aruba for just under $500 million in 2004). Covisint started looking at alternatives, such as establishing an auto-industry messaging and document-delivery service, to find a justification to exist.

The automakers offloaded Covisint in 2004 to Compuware, which retained Bob Paul as president and chief operating officer. In announcing the acquisition, Compuware chair and CEO Peter Karmanos proclaimed he was confident the e-commerce portal company could grow from $20 million per year to $100 million over the next few years.

That expectation proved exaggerated, but Covisint today can be counted as not only a dot-com survivor but also a valuable player in the auto industry’s e-commerce world -- and it is branching out into other areas, including healthcare.

“We grew 65% last year to hit $33 million,” says Covisint’s President and CEO Bob Paul. “We’re on track for 2007 to be in excess of $50 million gross revenues, with profit of $6 million to $7 million.”

Paul says the tide started turning about four years ago when Covisint began focusing on building a collaborative supply-chain environment around Internet-based electronic data interchange, translating between manufacturers’ different formats and protocols when necessary.