AN award-winning hi-tech firm has become another victim of the dot.com slump.

Thame-based Connectology, which in 1999 became the top Oxfordshire firm in the Fast Track 100 list of most rapidly growing companies, appointed liquidators Errington Walker to wind up its affairs at a creditors' meeting.

Now it has gone into creditors' voluntary liquidation. All 20 staff have been made redundant.

Liquidator Jane Walker said: "There is a deficiency of £250,000 and a possible contingency liability concerning a lease as well."

She added that there was a hope the company, which supplied computer and Internet technology, would be bought up and some of the workers taken back.

Connectology was founded in 1994 by directors Tom Redmond and Jonathan Wagstaffe, after their own employer went bankrupt, to sell computer networking equipment. Between 1994 and 1999 the company grew at a rate of 128 per cent a year, with turnover rising from £358,000 to £4.2m, making it the ninth quickest-growing company in the nation according to the Fast Track 100 survey.

In 1999 the company was a finalist in the Oxfordshire Business Awards.

Now words uttered by Mr Wagstaffe two years ago will come back to haunt him. He said: "As an organisation dealing with technology we have to be ahead of the field.

"This e-commerce solution lets us say to companies of our size 'you too can do something very exciting in e-commerce without huge investment'."

He said predictions that any company not embracing e-commerce would fail within a few years posed serious problems for smaller firms.