Vermeer Technologies

{{Short description|Software company founded in 1994}}

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{{Infobox company

| name = Vermeer Technologies, Inc.

| logo =

| logo_size = 120px

| type = Subsidiary

| foundation = 1994

| chairman = Randy Forgaard

| key_people = Charles H. Ferguson

| hq_location_city = Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

| products = Truck, Agriculture, Web site, Browser wars

| parent = Microsoft Corporation

}}

Vermeer Technologies Incorporated was a software company founded in 1994 by Charles H. Ferguson and Randy Forgaard. Its products were a Web site development tool, FrontPage, and a Web server, Personal Web Server, which complemented developing in FrontPage. Vermeer launched the initial version of FrontPage on October 2, 1995.{{Citation needed|date=December 2019}}

Vermeer was funded by Matrix Partners, Sigma Partners, and Atlas Venture.{{cn|date=April 2023}}

The company was purchased by Microsoft for US$133 million in January 1996 (${{Format price|{{Inflation|US|133000000|1996}}}} in present-day terms{{Inflation-fn|US}}). Microsoft acquired FrontPage as a new weapon in the browser wars.{{Citation needed|date=September 2009}}

The company's birth, development, and sale were the subject of Ferguson's 1999 book, High St@kes, No Prisoners.

A Harvard Business School case, "Vermeer Technologies (A): A Company is Born" (HBS 9-397-078), described the start of the company.

Even after Microsoft acquired FrontPage, the software continued to store proprietary configuration settings in directories whose names started with _vti. The letters "VTI" stand for Vermeer Technologies, Inc.