From Thestreet.com today:
Inktomi, European Style
With its portal services, search-engine technology and shopping engine, Inktomi (INKT:Nasdaq) is ready to see strong growth from Europe as Europeans tire of American content on the Internet, company CEO David Peterschmidt told a group of investors at the H&Q conference Tuesday.
"Europe is about ready to explode," he said, noting that the company recently signed a deal with British Telecom (BTY:Nasdaq) to launch a search engine loaded with more than 40 million European documents.
Inktomi's revenue comes from a mix of per-search fees and ad and transaction revenues. Back in the U.S., Inktomi has thrived through partnerships with GeoCities (GCTY:Nasdaq), Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq), Snap.com and others.
The company's search technology handled 1.8 billion search queries last quarter, a 33% rise from the previous quarter. Peterschmidt envisions a searchable database of more than 8 billion documents by 2002.
Inktomi also said it's working to differentiate the services it offers to different, and often competing, companies. "Partners don't want the same services as competitors," said Peterschmidt. As Paul Gauthier, CTO and co-founder told TSC earlier, Inktomi's technology "is extremely customizable for our customers. They can craft different services even though they are all using the same back-end. That is critical to our product." |
