FSA Corporation

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FSA Corporation

Company type	Load Balancer PowerBroker PowerLogin PowerTelnet PowerFTP CipherLink
Number of employees	8 (at time of acquisition by McAfee in 1996)

FSA Corporation (formerly Freedman, Sharp, and Associates) developed

operating system. De Raadt was FSA's first non-founding employee.

History

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Early years

The company was founded by Dan Freedman and Maurice Sharp.[2]

From 1989 through the end of 1991, Freedman and Sharp operated FSA as a consulting company, dealing at the driver and administration level with the large computer networks of the day (large in 1990 meant anything more than about 10 computers on a

).

In early 1992, Maurice Sharp chose to leave the company, taking a full-time intern position at

. Freedman renamed the company from Freedman, Sharp, and Associates to FSA Corporation, and changed its focus from system-administrative consulting to distributed workload management.

Shortly after the departure of Maurice Sharp, Freedman began to assemble materials for a 3-day

network. Freedman marketed and taught the course 10 times in 1992 in various North American cities. He cites the course as being an important way of learning the concerns of system administrators, providing the feedback he needed to decide what products and services FSA would offer next.

While the security course phase of FSA's history did not produce any notable products, the course served as an important mechanism by which the company could quickly engage with potential customers, learning their needs and deriving a plan for product development on the basis of what was learned.

Freedman's graduate work at the

, and the load balancer product line is now sold by IBM.

PowerBroker

The sale of Load Balancer left the company with staff and cash, but no product. Freedman had developed and marketed a 3-day UNIX security course in 1992, and had developed significant contacts within the banking, defense, and chip-making communities. These customers all had similar problems in managing large UNIX networks, specifically concerning the control and audit of the actions of the systems' administrators. The problem was that the root account used by systems administrators when reconfiguring parts of the system, was able to edit any of the audit trails created by the system. Freedman designed a new product,

also contributing.

The PowerBroker product line was sold non-exclusively to

• Raxco launched
  Symantec Corporation, who later spun off UPM and other products as PassGo Technologies, now part of Quest Software
  .
• BeyondTrust continues to sell the product under the Privilege Management for Unix and Linux name.

In 1995, the company began to develop network encryption technologies, again in response to a growing number of similar requests from its customers. Early products in this sphere included

trade show in April, 1996. The product was well received, and became a finalist for the Best Product of Show award at the trade show that year.

In early 1995,

was brought on board by Dan Freedman as a management consultant in the Fall of 1995, and remained with the company until its acquisition by McAfee in 1996.

Acquisition by McAfee Associates

In August, 1996, FSA was acquired by antivirus maker

.

Many of the personnel involved with FSA later joined another of Freedman's high-technology startup company, Jasomi Networks.

FSA Corporation was funded without the assistance of

available to Canadian companies.