Fastlane Technologies Incorporate Intro AND o Bjective PDF

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FASTLANE TECHNOLOGIES INCORPORATED

Introduction FastLane Technologies was a young business software company that developed a powerful language that could help companies organize, and control large corporate networks. It was incorporated in the year 1993 by David Seguin and Eric Kitchen. Both are the young entrepreneurs who were 29 and 25 respectively. Both were working at Canada's Department of Communications in Ottawa, Canada. They both had an interest in developing network administration software. To develop these kinds of applications, they developed a specialized programming language called FINALtm (FastLane Integrated Network Application language), and FastLane’s flagship product was born. In the summer of 1993, they were successful in winning a $55,000 consulting contract with a small Ottawa-based consulting firm. Later in 1993, the two entrepreneurs had an opportunity to demonstrate FINAL to managers at Employment and Immigration Canada and to Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND). Revenues in 1993 were $93,000, and the company was modestly profitable. In 1994, FastLane was successful in capturing a few more contracts to write scripts (or programs) using FINAL to solve specific customer problems. FastLane began hiring support staff in 1994 &. Revenues exceeded $600,000 for 1994, and FastLane was profitable. With the launch of the PC by IBM in 1981, which legitimized the personal computer that had been pioneered by Apple Computer and others in the late 1970s, computer resources became increasingly decentralized. Individual users often selected their own software and even their own hardware. The situation became chaotic in many organizations. . This situation became even more complex in the mid-1980s as personal computers were linked into local area networks (LANs) and began to share resources such as printers and file servers. In many organizations, different groups or departments used different network operating systems (NOS) to control these LANs. A global enterprise directory was designed to manage all network resources throughout the enterprise in a unified manner. These directories were organized in a hierarchical tree structure In late 1996 Newbridge Networks and Celtic House, a venture capital company received a capital injection. In May 1997, FastLane's new vice president (Jan Kaminski) of marketing should make his first presentation to FastLane's board of directors on its planned marketing strategies. In 1997, the leading NOS was Novell’s Netware, which controlled almost 50 % of networks. Banyan VINES was another NOS based on UNIX that was particularly powerful when used on very large enterprise networks.

The fastest-growing NOS in 1997 was Windows NT Server, which was installed on over 20 % of the networks. This percentage was expected to grow rapidly over the next few years with perhaps 40% of all servers using Windows NT Server by 2000. The company faced a range of important issues, including whether or not to rely on language or the use of language-based tools and the most successful strategy for rapidly pushing their products to a leading position in the emerging market segment for Windows NT services. Developing successful platforms to penetrate large organizations which were his clients' target was an especially challenging task. Objective for FastLane

The FastLane management team and the board of directors established aggressive growth targets for the company early in 1997. Revenue development was the priority in 1997 and 1998 with expectations of $2 million and $8 million , respectively. They concluded that sales of $100 million would not be an ambitious goal for the company within five to seven years. Some industry experts were expecting the broad and rapidly rising demand for NT services to be about $12-$15 billion by 2000....