The NW 200. Best practices: Interviews with five top CEOs. Who's zooming whom? A list of mergers and acquisitions. The Stalwarts: A look at five industry powerhouses.

Making the Network World 200 isn't easy. Dozens of companies just missed a spot on our exclusive list. Some are established firms that already have success stories to tell, while others are start-ups working toward potentially bright futures.

We've chosen five such companies to profile. Four of them are public, one private. Their markets range from security to online content to embedded software. What they share is a willingness to identify and quickly adapt to technology trends. Here are some of the companies just over the Network World 200 horizon.

Lycos searches for an audience

Lycos, Inc. is in the eyeball game."Our sole focus is audience size," says Robert Davis, CEO of the 3-year-old online information provider. "Anyplace there are consumers, there are advertisers."

So far Lycos has been pretty successful in drawing an audience - or "eyeballs," in industry parlance - for those advertisers. The company estimates its Web site averages more than 10 million visitors each day.

With the recent purchase of Tripod, Inc., creator of a popular consumer Web site targeted at the lucrative Generation-X market, Lycos' network of Web sites now ranks fifth worldwide in attracting visitors, trailing only America Online, Inc., Yahoo, Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Netscape Communications Corp.

The recipe Lycos uses to draw audiences is similar to that used by Yahoo, InfoSeek Corp. and other online content aggregators. The company provides Web users easy access to organized information on a wide range of topics - including personal finances, travel, sports and the weather. Along with the information visitors download are banner ads sold by Lycos.

The ability to drive and capture Web traffic has made Lycos one of the few profitable companies today among those relying on Internet advertising for its chief source of revenue.

After five consecutive quarters of losses since going public in April 1996, Lycos has posted profits - albeit modest ones - for the past two quarters. Its stock is trading at an all-time high of more than $60 per share. The company was founded in June 1995 to sell search engine technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Like Yahoo, InfoSeek and Excite, Inc., all of which began as search engines, Lycos quickly diversified its Web site offerings in order to tap into the growing online advertising market.

Concord leads in network analysis tools market

If there's one thing network managers and chief information officers can't get enough of, it's information on how their networks are running.

So it's no surprise that the market for network performance and analysis software is expected to grow from $50 million in 1996 to $700 million by 2000, according to META Group, Inc.

Today, the undisputed leader of that market is a 12-year-old company that originally sold hardware monitoring devices for manufacturing automation.

Concord Communications, Inc.'s journey from hardware hawker to Web-based software vendor has a common thread: the company's evolving expertise in network management.

In 1989, three years after its launch as a maker of hardware probes, Concord began developing network management software. By 1992, almost all of the company's revenue came from Trakker, a LAN monitoring tool.

Two years later, the company reorganized. Jack Blaeser, a venture capitalist and Concord board member, was named president and CEO. Blaeser and a new management team saw a great vehicle to expand the markets for Concord's network analysis tools - the Internet.

By the end of 1995, Concord began shipping Network Health, a Web-based, software-only performance and analysis product.

Concord now offers four different products under the Network Health name. Three are designed to monitor and report on specific parts of the network: LAN/WAN and frame relay; routers and switches; and servers. The fourth product, Traffic Accountant, provides information on network usage patterns.

More than 75% of Concord's revenue comes from the LAN/WAN and router/switch products.Concord has more than 500 customers for its products. In March alone, it added megacorporations such as BankBoston, MasterCard, Xerox, Staples and Disney.

Last year was Concord's best yet. Besides more than doubling earnings over 1996 to nearly $20 million, the company launched a successful initial public offering in October, raising $41 million. Concord's stock has been trading at twice the offer price of $14.

Change is embedded at Spyglass

Today, Spyglass, Inc. sells embedded software that allows non-PC consumer devices to access the Internet. But President and CEO Douglas Colbeth can't say for sure what his company will be doing once the next millennium begins. And that's fine with him.

"To survive in our business you have to be willing to reinvent yourself every three years," he says. Founded in 1990, Spyglass has pretty much kept pace with Col-beth's law of high-tech survival. The company began by selling 3-D modeling software to scientists for medical, geological and geographical research.

Spyglass came up with some great technology, but the market wasn't ready for it. And the government research funds that fueled sales were declining.Along came the Internet, and with it Spyglass' second incarnation, for which it is best-known. In 1994, Spyglass was granted a license by the University of Illinois - where several Spyglass engineers were students - to develop a commercial version of Mosaic, the first Web browser.

It appeared that Spyglass had struck gold with Mosaic. Microsoft Corp. paid the company $2 million in late 1994 for the rights to include Mosaic technology in its Windows 95 operating system.

Dozens of other vendors licensed Spyglass technology, and by the end of 1995, the company was pulling down $20 million annually in licensing revenue alone.

Then Microsoft announced it would begin giving away its Mosaic-based browser, Internet Explorer. While Spyglass earned licensing fees for every browser Microsoft gave away, the start-up lost much more revenue from direct customers stampeding toward the freebie.

Enter Phase III of the Spyglass story. Recognizing that the Internet's reach would soon extend beyond the desktop, Spyglass in late 1996 refocused its strategy, developing a line of browser software to Web-enable consumer devices such as set-top boxes and TVs, cellular phones, personal digital assistants and office equipment. It also began offering consulting services to device manufacturers.

The transition has not been painless. Spyglass sustained almost $10 million in losses during its last fiscal year and doesn't expect to make a profit until next year.

ISS products go looking for trouble

Back in 1994, when Internet Security Systems, Inc. (ISS) was formed, protecting your network essentially meant implementing a password system or, if you were really cutting edge, installing a firewall.

But with the brave new world of the Internet and electronic commerce on the horizon, ISS founder Christopher Klaus didn't think the answer to a company's security concerns was to build a moat around its network.

Besides, it didn't make much sense to join the more than 50 firewall vendors fighting for one piece of the security market.So Klaus decided to base the first ISS product on a research project he had developed as a student at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

That product, Internet Scanner, in essence serves as a network's night watchman, continuously making its rounds by automatically searching for vulnerabilities, detecting security breaches and, if necessary, taking action to eliminate security holes.

ISS President and CEO Thomas Noonan calls this continuous process Adaptive Security Management, and it is the basis for the company's SAFEsuite line of software, which includes Internet Scanner.

"The only way to effectively manage risk is to develop automated functions that work across the network and across each device," Noonan says.

With more than 2,000 paying customers, ISS revenue has grown from $257,000 in 1995 to $13.5 million last year. The company is the market leader in intrusion detection software.

ISS was greeted with open arms by Wall Street when it launched an initial public offering (IPO) on March 24. Its holding company, ISS Group, Inc., raised $66 million in the IPO. In less than a month, the price of ISS shares has risen to twice the $22 per share offer price.

OpenConnect wants to Web-enable your networkThe idea behind networking is simple: You link different computer systems, enabling them to interact, and you have a network.

Reality, of course, is much different. For years one of the biggest challenges facing any network manager has been integrating legacy environments with open systems.

Throw the Internet into the mix and the challenge of network integration becomes colossal, and the opportunities enormous.

Network integration is the market OpenConnect Systems, Inc. has targeted. Founded in 1983, the private company provides customers with the tools and services they need to connect diverse systems.

The company's products handle such unglamorous but vital chores as protocol conversion, file transfer, printing, terminal emulation and interprogram communications.OpenConnect's specialty is providing Web-based access to host applications. The company's WebConnect products, featuring a Java-based browser, now own about a 50% share of the Web-enabling market, according to President and CEO Steve Clark.

While OpenConnect has had little trouble attracting large customers, including 40 of the Fortune 50, profits recently have become elusive.After eking out $1.8 million in profits in 1996, the company lost $13.4 million in 1997 and cut its work force by 20%.

"The market was slow to take off last year because of year 2000 and other technology issues," Clark says. "Many of those issues are behind us now."