Avant-Garde Computing, Inc., was a publicly traded American software and computer hardware company active from 1978 to 1990 and based in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. It was most well known for its Net/Command, Net/Adviser, Net/Alert, and Net/Guard suite of network management, monitoring, and security products. The company was acquired by Boole & Babbage in 1990 after a five-year string of losses.
Beginning
Avant-Garde Computing was founded by Timothy P. Ahlstrom and F. Morgan LaMarche and incorporated in 1978. Ahlstrom and LaMarche were previously 20 year veterans of IBM, both working in that company's marketing department. In their off-time in the early 1970s, the duo built a device that would warn computer operators when a data tape was close to the end of its reel, founding Ahlstrom LaMarche & Co. to market it. The device proliferated rapidly in the computer rooms of various companies, and the duo later sold their company and its patents to Telegentics of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to reportedly modest profit. After several years, the duo regrouped and discussed starting another business. They decided to invite several top executives of companies who ran large mainframe computer networks to dinner at a restaurant. When Ahlstrom and LaMarche asked them what troubles they frequently encountered, network management was cited as the most challenging task. These conversations inspired the duo to raise the capital to incorporate Avant-Garde Computing in Cherry Hill; in order to secure adequate financing, the two also put second mortgages on their homes.
The company's first product, Net/Alert, was announced in October 1979. It was a hardware–software network management suite comprising a light-pen-capable, color CRT monitor, logic analyzer, and graphical software to analyze traffic on a mainframe network and display and print reports based on the collected data. Net/Alert took two years to develop and was primarily the brainchild of Ahlstrom; LaMarche meanwhile possessed the marketing prowess. In the time between the product's development and their first sale, the duo sold a 45-percent stake of Avant-Garde Computing, worth US$500,000, to Northern Telecom's United States subsidiary in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1980. Northern Telecom U.S.'s Spectron division purchased the first Net/Alert units–worth $3.6 million—in January 1981. With the help of Spectron, Avant-Garde won clients such as Citibank, Xerox, Cigna, MetLife, Chase Manhattan Bank, Shearson/American Express, and Air France within two years of Net/Alert's introduction.
Success
In June 1983, Avant-Garde went public, issuing 1.1 million shares of common stock. The proceeds from the company's initial public offering allowed the company to retire its debt and earn working capital. Soon after the IPO, Northern Telecom relinquished their 45-percent stake in Avant-Garde, pocketing $20 million in the process.
Sales and profits doubled for Avant-Garde between the last quarter of 1982 and the first quarter of 1983. In November 1983, Avant-Garde received a $1 million order for Net/Alert from Southern Bell, their largest order yet. This was followed up by a $3.8 million order from Merrill Lynch the next month. This sale alone was larger than Avant-Garde's entire second-quarter revenue earnings ($3.5 million). Avant-Garde ended the year with a $250,150 order from Indiana Bell. By January 1984, 60 units of Net/Alert had been shipped to a variety of clients, including Walt Disney World, the Library of Congress, Credit Suisse, El Paso Natural Gas, Florida Power & Light, and Public Service Electric & Gas Company. Avant-Garde's main rivals at the time comprised Tesdata Systems and Encom. Tesdata had been faltering financially while Encom's network management product was much smaller in scope than Net/Alert.
Avant-Garde employed 110 people in February 1984. Following a profitable third quarter of 1983 in which the company saw their sales double and revenues triple and received five new orders (including one from the IRSST, a government institution of Quebec), Avant-Garde moved their headquarters from Cherry Hill to a larger 36,000-square-foot building in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. The company also opened four regional offices across the nation: in Manhattan, Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco. In 1984, Inc. named Avant-Garde the 72nd fastest-growing corporation in the United States.