You don't have to be a cynic to be skeptical about Andrew "Flip" Filipowski's latest plan to revive Divine Interventures.

After all, how many CEOs managed to vaporize a few hundred million of investors' dollars in less than nine months?

Come to think of it, quite a few. The list runs longer than a MarchFirst shareholder's long face.

Let's admit it. Filipowski is hardly the only founder to lead investors on an ill-timed charge into a new economy promised land. But he's also not just any founder. And Divine is no mere relic of an Internet-investing bubble.

Optimistic Chicagoans embraced their flamboyant native son as a visionary trailblazer and cheerleader for the region's high-tech hopes. Divine was to be the city's beachhead in Internet heaven.

That's why it's worth noting Filipowski's decision to steer the company to more familiar turf as a purveyor of enterprise software under a new name, Divine Inc.

This new Divine will buy, roll up and operate software companies, a strategy Filipowski pursued with some success at his former Platinum Technology.

Filipowski wants us to bury any notion that Divine is an incubator--a business the stock market loves as much as real estate developers like toxic waste.

Actually, Filipowski never liked the term "incubator," though the moniker stuck. "It sounds like a bunch of chickens running around with their heads cut off," he protested.

Instead, he waxed philosophical about ushering in a new era. An age of "eco-nets"--loose confederations of companies with common stakeholders that would promote one another's interests around the globe.

Divine was neither incubator nor venture capital fund, he insisted. It was an operating company. A developer of high-tech businesses in a region starved for venture capital and the services needed to nurture start-ups.

Yet if you strip away all the visionary rhetoric, Divine was simply a vehicle for raising one heck of a lot of money at a time when money was cheap. It was a venture-investing machine to take start-ups public at a time when the IPO market was red hot.

All of that is history now.

When the IPO market collapsed, so did Filipowski's strategy.

And Divine looks a lot less like an operating company today than an ambitious financial play gone awry.

Late last year, Filipowski articulated a strategy better suited for hard times.

With the stock market assigning so little value to Internet start-ups, Divine would use its remaining cash to buy companies cheap and roll them up into bigger--and, it is hoped, more valuable--enterprises.

Trouble is, investors didn't buy it. Divine's stock keeps bumping along at bargain-basement levels. So Filipowski tried again this week to kill, once and for all, any notion that Divine is an incubator.

"When people say `Divine,' they'll think of us as a software company," he said.

To make his point, he began to put some flesh on the bones of Divine's roll-up strategy. He announced a first deal--the acquisition of a small Connecticut firm offering enterprise portal software.

That's one of seven segments in which the new Divine Inc. intends to focus. Stay tuned for announcements about others.

About time.

No one doubts that it's time to get past that "chickens-with-their-heads-cut-off" thing.

And no one seriously regards Divine as a bellwether of the regional economy.

The generous among us will wish Filipowski well. Building a software company is no easy task in a market dominated by giants.

Still, he has a pile of cash. An acquisition strategy. Some deals.

Now that sounds Divine.