According to Michael Drapkin, chair of e-commerce management at Columbia University, "Everything that a CTO does needs to be tied back to profitability. [A good CTO] ends up becoming an investor in the company."

Although the paths to profitability may vary, the critical lessons learned from promising Internet efforts have a common theme: CTOs -- and the professionals that carry other titles but fulfill duties associated with that role -- must give their organizations a razor-sharp competitive edge through technology and help the company cement close relationships with worthwhile customers, all while keeping a lid on unnecessary expenses.

"The companies that are left standing -- the ones that are profitable and will continue to be -- are focused on helping customers solve a problem," says Patricia Seybold, founder of Boston-based Patricia Seybold Group and author of The Customer Revolution.

In the past, many business-to-consumer companies' basic strategy was simply to draw eyeballs to their Web sites, notes Steve Baloff, general partner at Advanced Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, Calif. The thinking was "the more traffic I will get, the more money I will get later," Baloff says. "At the end of the day, there wasn't the demand."

The Internet companies that continue to appear promising are infrastructure companies that create Internet-related technology and businesses that have created something of value to customers that is completely new, leads its markets, or caters to profitable niches, notes Dana Serman, Internet analyst at Lazard Freres & Co., in New York.

In this downturn, profits are key. "The questions people were asking [during the Internet boom] had no ties to money whatsoever. ... They were asking, 'How much traffic am I getting? What are people looking at?' " says Eric Richard, CTO and co-founder of Web analysis software maker net.Genesis based in Cambridge, Mass. "[CTOs] have gotten the business maturity and the savvy to now start asking [different] questions. ... It's now tied much more clearly to the end business goals than before."

For a look down the Internet's often-thorny profitability path, consider efforts at Bricsnet, Monster.com, Ultimus, and Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. Although the companies vary considerably by size, market, and business strategy, all have critical lessons to offer CTOs.

Bricsnet

Lesson for CTOs: Unify efforts and focus on the customer with clout. Bricsnet has a classic dot-com story to tell. It has provided technology solutions for the commercial building industry since 1986 and bet on the Internet to propel it to greater riches.

"The most important thing is focus," Van Emmerik says. "We were selling to a lot of different audiences, like architects, engineers, contractors, [and] manufacturers. It was just too complex -- too many products, too many markets."

Also, rather than bear the expense of doing a lot of up-front development, Van Emmerik's team tries to leverage custom development projects. "Customers actually pay for certain implementations and then we generalize that and put [it] into the core product," he says.

The CTO also finds that he must wear a new hat: salesman. "We are very much a

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