And yet, Trizetto CEO Jeff Margolis adamantly refuses to take on any public profile whatsoever. He almost never gives interveiws or talks to the press. He speaks to Wall Street very sparingly (although in the recent conference call, he took an anonymous swipe at Mr. Bush). So, while Athena trades for a zillion times revenue and 10 zillion times earnings, Trizetto languishes.

I think, in a not disinterested way, that Trizetto will be made to belch forth unrealized value. BTW: if you can score a HIStalk interview with Mr. Margolis, who has a very interesting personal story (it’s public knowledge that he lives with a chronic and serious disease) that would be something of a coup.

Trinitas – http://www.eclipsys.com/News/New_releases_details.asp?id=242
Summa – http://www.eclipsys.com/News/New_releases_details.asp?id=241

As for Athena, a number of reasons they are doing well right now:
1) Great, virtually no-risk for practice revenue model wherein athena takes a cut of claims.
2) Addresses a very real problem that physicians themselves can stand doing.
3) Have targeted a very large potential market – those smaller practices, there are thousands of them and most have rudimentary IT systems.
4) Small practices have non-existent IT staffs to support their systems. Athena’s SaaS delivery model fits perfectly.
5) And one can not over-look a very savvy mgmt team who are thought-provoking, bucking the establishment and pretty savvy marketers. The y appear to know how to “jazz” the market, both investor market and the provider market. On this point, in many ways they are similar to Salesforce.com’s leadership and Salesforce.com has done very well for their investors.