Not long ago, we had a chat with Steven F. Crowley of Craig-Hallum. He’s managing director of health care research at the company, which is an investment boutique in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The firm helps institutional investors find big opportunities.

There are slim pickings in the healthcare IT investment world at the moment, Crowley says. So the firm is casting a wider net. Specifically, Craig-Hallum is looking at an electronic data capture (EDC) company. The firm has analyzed other public e-clinical companies besides Phase Forward but does not yet formally cover them.

He predicts Phase Forward stock could jump by a quarter, to $16, from its present neighborhood of $13. Ten years from now, he predicts, Phase Forward could have half a billion in sales annually. Billion, with a “b.” What’s more, Craig-Hallum says, Glaxo has already used Phase Forward in 200 trials.

Crowley has spent a goodly amount of time hearing the pitch of the people at Phase Forward. We suspect he could finish some of their sentences. He seconds the Phase Forward view that there may be comparisons between Phase Forward and Cisco Systems, the networking giant.  The two companies are not strictly comparable, of course. They’re different in size and stage of life cycle.

But there are a few parallels. Cisco has snapped up selected rivals at fire-sale prices; some networking competitors never got traction because of Cisco’s size and prominence. The same could be true of Phase Forward. If it remains the dominant company in its category, Phase Forward could soon have a play book that resembles Cisco’s, Crowley suggests. Still, fighting the complacency that can find its way into a big technology company (see IBM or Digital Eqiupment) won’t be trivial.

Having been one of the earlier entrants into EDC to survive, Crowley believes, Phase Forward is now reaping some of the rewards. “They’ve continued to experience an environment that is supportive of the case that the industry is moving along, that the adoption of EDC is accelerating,” Crowley says. “Customers have moved beyond the point of being obsessed with return on investment studies. They’re selecting a partner, a premium vendor, to suit their needs. Several companies should be the beneficiaries of that.”

Crowley thinks Phase Forward is already winning customers who have their eye on its safety products, even if they have no immediate budget for them. “It is enhancing the growth of the Phase Forward EDC franchise even though it is not having a big needle-moving effect on Phase Forward’s top line,” Crowley says of the safety suite that Phase Forward developed internally and acquired in the purchase of Lincoln Technologies.

Like everyone else in the industry, Crowley is at a loss to quantify the extent to which smaller, private EDC companies may or may not be gaining on Oracle Clinical and Phase Forward. He thinks the niche is growing so robustly that the top companies will all do well.

Beyond that, he’s not overly concerned about the loss or gain of an individual trial here and there. “Medidata comes up in conversation,” he says, “though it’s difficult to quantify what kind of presence they have in customers. It certainly seems that Phase Forward has hit upon a successful way to counter the Medidata competitive thrust.”

But Crowley was more blunt on the fortunes of three other publicly traded companies in the industry: etrials, eResearch Technology and DataTrak, saying his view is that they are not in the same league as, say, Phase Forward. “The business they’re going after is a lot of ones-ie and twos-ie trials. The business that Medidata, Phase Forward and Oracle are going after are the enterprise deals,” says Crowley. “Are these guys really competing against each other the way they were a few years ago? We are really talking about pieces of business that represent apples and oranges.”

Yes, those are fighting words in some quarters, and we appreciate Crowley sharing them even if our email program crashes under the attack. etrials has a conference call with analysts this week, and perhaps there will be additional illumination of whether all EDC companies are growing with equal vigor. If you have facts, or your own favorite analyst we should be talking to instead, do let know. Really. Or, if you’d rather have a copy of Crowley’s research on Phase Forward, please contact his colleague .