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To: Jan Crawley who wrote (50881)	4/16/1999 3:15:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

RPT)-Web builders set for boisterous Q1 By Andrew Hay NEW YORK, April 16 (Reuters) - They lack the fame and glamour of online retailers and media networks but Internet software and hardware firms are set to post a raucous first quarter and remain favorites on Wall Street. E-commerce firms like Amazon.com Inc. <AMZN.O> and eBay Inc. <EBAY.O> are mainstays among momentum traders. But large brokerage houses also include firms like Inktomi Corp. <INKT.O>, DoubleClick Inc. <DCLK.O> and RealNetworks Inc. <RNWK.O> among their long-term online bets. And if any companies are to come out of the Internet economy unscathed it is those that have built the net -- Cisco Systems Inc. <CSCO.O>, Lucent Technologies Inc. <LU.N> and others whose customers are online businesses, analysts said. "The infrastructure companies are continuing to benefit from very strong growth in electronic commerce," Dain Rauscher Wessels' Stephen Sigmond said in a telephone interview, in contrast to Web retailers, who may face difficulties matching their holiday-fueled fourth quarter reports. "There doesn't appear much of a seasonal downtrend in the first quarter," he said. Late Thursday, for example, Inktomi, a provider of Web directory software, reported fiscal second quarter revenues up 323 percent. But its net loss declined only slightly to $4.6 million from $4.8 million, amid aggressive expansion plans. Analysts said intranets and extranets - networks inside a company and those that link it with partners - are experiencing tremendous growth. And as online commerce heats up, companies are looking for products that channel Internet customers to their sites and keep them there. Fueling these trends is the move up to high-speed Internet access, especially within companies, but increasingly also among home computer users -- removing a major speed bump slowing business on the Net. Needham & Co. analyst Ken Winston expects leading online advertising firm DoubleClick to post a narrower loss of 13 cents per share and higher revenues of $18.5 million. Sigmond expects Network Solutions Inc. <NSOL.O>, the company that registers the names of most Internet sites, to post first-quarter earnings per share around 12 cents on revenues of $35 million, double the $16.5 million last year. He sees e-commerce software firm VeriSign Inc. <VRSN.O> posting a loss around 9 cents, down from 27 cents last year, on revenues of $14.5 million. Verisign sells software to ensure secure commercial transactions over the Internet. Guy Truicko said the only truly long-term investments in the infrastructure group are firms that provided the network equipment to build the Web. Truicko, a portfolio manager at Unity Management in Garden City, N.Y. sees only short-term and an even shorter-term Web investments among most infrastructure and services firms. "You can't look at these things as long term investments," Truicko said in a telephone interview. "The barriers to entry are so low, no-one has a dominant competitive advantage," he said of the copycat nature of many Internet software ventures that often begin in people's garages. The following is a table with First Call consensus estimates for the first quarter versus the First Call result for same period a year earlier for leading Internet infrastructure companies. Company First Call Q1 EPS Q1'98 BroadVision Inc. <BVSN.O> loss $0.02 profit $0.09 Cisco Systems Inc. <CSCO.O> profit $0.37 profit $0.30 DoubleClick Inc. <DCLK.O> loss $0.13 loss $0.16 Lucent Technologies Inc.<LU.N> profit $0.15 profit $0.07 Network Solutions Inc.<NSOL.O> profit $0.12 profit $0.07 RealNetworks Inc. <RNWK.O> profit $0.04 loss $0.03 Vignette Corp. <VIGN.O> loss n/a(a) loss $0.33 VeriSign Inc. <VRSN.O> loss $0.10 loss $0.27 Note:(a) Vignette made an initial public stock offering in February. ...