8 Fastest-Growing tech companies

Baidu
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100 Fastest-Growing rank: 4 (Previous rank: N.A.)
CEO: Robin Li
Address: 10 Shangdi 10th St., Beijing, China

Founded by Robin Li and Eric Xu in 2000, Baidu has evolved into the largest search engine portal in China with a market share of nearly 75%. Its services let more than 300 million Chinese users find news, web sites, audio files and images and targeted marketing tools like P4P, which lets companies pay for and generate ads that appear in search listings.

Recently, Baidu struck a two-year deal with One-Stop China, a local joint venture owned by Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music. It will let users legally download and stream over 500,000 songs for free. Aggressive moves such as these goes a long way to explaining why the search portal saw three-year annualized earnings-per-share growth of 78%.

Cirrus Logic
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Cirrus Logic
100 Fastest-Growing rank: 11 (Previous rank: N.A.)
CEO: Jason Rhode
Address: 2901 Via Fortuna, Austin, Texas

This semiconductor company, which supplies integrated circuit products to a variety of consumer and commercial applications, saw huge three-year annualized earnings-per-share gains of 340%.

During 2010, it focused on its Digital Energy Control initiative with an LED lighting controller that it says is more effective than the competition, not to mention compatible with more LED light bulbs. But the largest driver of revenue over the last few years remains its portable audio business. Its products are used in everything from smartphones and tablets to Blu-ray players, bringing in $265 million during fiscal 2011, or nearly 70% of the company's annual revenue.

Priceline.com
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Priceline.com
100 Fastest-Growing rank: 12 (Previous rank: 11)
CEO: Jeffery H. Boyd
Address: 800 Connecticut Ave., Norwalk, Connecticut

It was another great year for the travel booking service, which saw profits climb to $528 million last year on sales of nearly $3.1 billion. That uptick was driven largely by international sales, which accounted for 69% of the company's overall bookings and Booking.com, the Connecticut-based international hotel reservations site it bought back in 2004.


Mercado Libre
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Mercado Libre
100 Fastest-Growing rank: 15 (Previous rank: N.A.)
CEO: Marcos Galperin
Address: Arias 3751 7th Floor, Buenos Aires, Argentina

With more than 53 million registered users, eBay's Latin American partner is the largest e-commerce platform in the region. More than half of its business comes from Brazil. Last year, revenues climbed to $217 million from $172 million -- more than double what it was three years prior. The company also launched MercadoShops, a service that lets users set up, manage and promote their own online stores.

Ebix
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Ebix
100 Fastest-Growing rank: 19 (Previous rank: 3)
CEO: Robin Raina
Address: 5 Concourse Pkwy NE Ste 3200, Atlanta, Georgia

The IT consulting and outsourcing company provides software solutions like carrier and agency systems to insurance companies and also runs online insurance data exchanges which account for nearly 71% of all revenues. The goal: become the leader in back-end insurance transactions.

If its performance in 2010 was any indication, it's certainly on track to achieve that. The company made three acquisitions last year and wrapped up a merger with ADAM, a health technology services company last February. Meanwhile, profits climbed 66% to $59 million, compared with the year before, on sales of $132 million.

Apple
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Apple
100 Fastest-Growing rank: 21 (Previous rank: N.A.)
CEO: Tim Cook
Address: 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California

It may be a no-brainer, but Apple is on a roll. Last year, it launched two products to great success: the iPhone 4 sold 1.7 million units during its first three days on shelves; the iPad moved nearly 14.7 million units by the end of the year. That momentum carried over into 2011. During the company's most recent quarter, iPhone sales grew 142%, while iPad sales expanded a whopping 183% thanks to a major hardware update. All that contributed to profits of $7.3 billion on revenues of $28.6 billion, a record on both fronts.

Acme Packet
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Acme Packet
100 Fastest-Growing rank: 25 (Previous rank: N.A.)
CEO: Andrew Ory
Address: 100 Crosby St., Bedford, Massachusetts

Catering to over 1,440 clients in 105 countries, Acme Packet manufactures session border controllers, multi-service security gateways and session routing proxies, all of which enable the delivery of voice, video and other types of multimedia sessions across different Internet protocol -- or IP -- networks. From 2008 to 2010, revenues nearly doubled to $231 million and profits almost quadrupled to $43 million, a company record. And as companies continue to replace older legacy technologies with IP-based solutions, Acme Packet expects to have a bigger role in what it in envisions as a multi-billion dollar market.

Riverbed Technology
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Riverbed Technology
100 Fastest-Growing rank: 27 (Previous rank: N.A.)
CEO: Jerry M. Kennelly
Address: 199 Fremont St., San Francisco, California

This IT-focused company is concentrated on the wide-area network (WAN) market, selling a range of products that optimize network performance and data access, boosting network transmission speeds by as much as 100 times in some cases. To that end, profits jumped from $7 million to $34 million 2010 on sales of $552 million due to increased customer demand, with nearly half those sales coming internationally.

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