Goodness gracious. IPOs with the suffix ".com" are back in vogue. And some South African firms look ready to ride their coat tails.

It`s official: technology initial public offerings (IPOs) are hip again. And some are even calling it the start of a "dotcom echo" of the heady days of the late 1990s.

Salesforce.com, an on-demand computing firm that boasts it`s heralding the death of software, gained 56 percent on its IPO price of $11 when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in late June.