Fast Lane - the independent that teaches the manufacturers’ courses

The business it is in is the one this site is written from, and the shape is worth stating because it is invisible from outside. A manufacturer writes a course and certifies who may teach it; an independent training company holds those authorisations across several manufacturers at once and employs the instructors who hold them. The customer buys a vendor course; the person in the room works for neither the vendor nor the customer.

The awards list is a useful artefact for that reason: Cisco Learning Partner of the Year in Latin America, Chile, Japan, Benelux, France, Italy, the Middle East and globally, across more than a decade. Vendor training is delivered regionally and judged regionally, because a course is only as good as the person standing in front of it, and that person is local.

The partnerships with Tech Data and Ingram Micro to deliver IBM curricula are the other half of the picture, and connect to the distribution entries here: the same distributors that move product also carry training, because a channel that cannot deploy what it sells does not sell it twice.

The company behind those awards is German, which is worth saying because the training industry this site describes is usually assumed to be American. The Fast Lane Institute for Knowledge Transfer was founded in Hamburg in 1996; its chief executive and chairman, Torsten Poels, had started his first networking-services company in 1990, run several Cisco learning partners, and joined in 2003 to build the group outward - into Russia and the CIS, the Americas from May 2005, Japan, Korea from 2006. It now claims some four thousand professionals, ninety countries, and a position no other training company holds: the only global training partner of all three cloud hyperscalers at once, alongside about thirty other vendors.

Two of the recent awards say something about where the model has gone. VMware's and Red Hat's are the familiar kind - a vendor recognising a partner for delivering the vendor's own curriculum well. Cisco's award for 2025 is different: it is for derivative work, which is the vendor's term for courseware the partner writes itself, built on the vendor's material but not identical to it. A training company that only delivers someone else's course is a channel; one whose own courseware the manufacturer gives prizes to is something closer to a publisher, and the difference is where the margin, and the intellectual property, end up.

A German company that became the largest independent multi-vendor training group is the training industry's version of the story the Italtel and Atos entries tell about equipment: the model was invented in America, and a European firm built the biggest instance of it by being in more countries than any vendor's own education arm could reach. The instructor in the room in Santiago or Seoul works for a company in Hamburg, teaching a course written in San Jose, to a customer who may never learn either fact.

Fast Lane is a group rather than a single company, which is why two founding dates circulate for it. The group dates to 1996 and is headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina; Fast Lane Institute for Knowledge Transfer GmbH, the German company whose name is often used for the whole organisation, was incorporated in 2003 and runs from Hamburg. Both are Fast Lane, and a database citing one or the other is describing a different legal entity, not contradicting itself.