Like the shovel and wheelbarrow makers who got rich by selling the tools to build the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1860s, Concord Communications of Marlborough has found a lucrative new market.
Concord sells products and services that are needed to build the new e-commerce economy. And it's reaping rich rewards.
The company, which ranked number eight in last year's Globe 100 overall financial performance list, hit number two in this year's list of top growth companies.
The company's sales have been nearly doubling every year since 1996.
But especially impressive has been Concord's record over the last two years of growing annual income at a stunning 892.6 percent a year - something unimaginable to many of the red ink-laden dot-coms to which it sells.
In the broadest terms, Concord's job is to make sure that electronic commerce works, both for online retailers and for the traditional companies that now sell their goods over the Internet, too.
And Concord does the same for telecommunications service providers.
Concord's software diagnoses and fixes problems in online commerce systems and monitors the costs.
Said Jack Blaeser, chief executive of the 375-person company (it expects to add 200 more employees by December): ''As human beings, we are very impatient with the Internet.
''When we click on `Enter,' we want the screen to fill out, just like when you pick up the phone you expect to get a dial tone. If we can make e-commerce work as well as dial tone, we'll be doing our job.
''The cost of losing customers is so enormous that, as a vendor, our customers have to pay almost anything it costs to prevent that,'' Blaeser said.
In the five years since its founding as a company that specialized in financial services firms, Concord has grown to about 2,000 customers, and it's adding about 150 more every three months.
They include online retailers such as homegrocer.com and 1-800-Flowers.com, and Burlington-based Internet telephony carrier iBasis, as well as a large stable of carriers, including AT&T and British Telecom. Also included are Internet service providers and Web-hosting companies such as Exodus, Mindspring, and HarvardNet of Charlestown.
In October, Concord announced plans to buy privately held Empire Technologies Inc. of Atlanta for $31 million in stock, a company whose technology it has licensed. It decided that outright ownership would speed penetration of the e-commerce market.
Blaeser said the company remains on the hunt for more acquisitions.
Concord Communications, he said, faces competition from ''lots of small companies,'' but he said it has one of the only, if not the only, end-to-end e-commerce solutions available.
Over time, giants such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard may become fierce foes. ''We thought one of those guys was going to squish us like a bug,'' Blaeser said, ''but every quarter they let us add more customers.''
Blaeser said his company is constantly looking for more employees but has a strict rule: ''They have to be smarter than we are and more motivated than we are.''
PETER J. HOWE
Company of year
