Network Appliance, Inc.

Network Appliance, Inc. may have one of the lowest profiles of any company on our last list, but the firm also had one of the best years.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company, which specializes in dedicated file servers for storage applications, roughly doubled its revenue over the course of 1997. NetApps attributed its growth to strong sales of network file system servers, but the company also made several moves to expand its business focus.

First, the company introduced multiprotocol versions of its servers that also support Windows. Second, the company bought Internet Middleware Corp. for $10.5 million, providing NetApps with technology at the heart of its new line of Web caching servers.