Fast Track Inc. was a software development company in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. It was founded by Robert H. Nichols in 1987 in

Germantown, Maryland Germantown is an urbanized census-designated place in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. With a population of 91,249 as of 2020 U.S. Decennial Census, Germantown is the third most populous place in Maryland, after the city of Baltimore ...

. The company was primarily known for its distributed network management products, primarily Exposé, which is cross-compatible with servers running

VINES A vine (Latin ''vīnea'' "grapevine", "vineyard", from ''vīnum'' "wine") is any plant with a growth habit of trailing or scandent (that is, climbing) stems, lianas or runners. The word ''vine'' can also refer to such stems or runners themselv ...

NetWare NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The original NetWare product in 19 ...

, and

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems sc ...

. It collects information from the services through the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Version 3 in 1994 introduced SuperMIB, a graphical framework for representing nodes in the network. In March 1996,

Symantec Symantec may refer to: *An American consumer software company now known as Gen Digital Inc. *A brand of enterprise security software purchased by Broadcom Inc. Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier ...

acquired Fast Track for

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7.22 million worth of

stock In finance, stock (also capital stock) consists of all the shares by which ownership of a corporation or company is divided.Longman Business English Dictionary: "stock - ''especially AmE'' one of the shares into which ownership of a company ...

. The acquisition gave Symantec their first codebase based on SNMP, which they promptly integrated into the Premier Edition of Norton Administrator Suite, their second stab at a network management product, in September 1996. This version of Norton Administrator Suite was met with mixed reception and poor adoption from customers, and by March 1997 Symantec had divested parts of Fast Track to other software companies.

References

{{US-software-company-stub Defunct software companies of the United States Gen Digital acquisitions