From this evening WSJ...were getting alot of good press.!
Net-Infrastructure Firm Inktomi
Delivers Numbers Investors Like
An INTERACTIVE JOURNAL News Roundup
Inktomi Corp.'s shares showed strength Friday after the Net-infrastructure company beat analysts' second-quarter
estimates, touting strong revenue growth and an
expanded customer base.
Shares of Inktomi climbed more than 10%, only to
surrender their gains as technology stocks faded in the
final hour. Inktomi wound up down 68.75 cents at
$118.50 for the day on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
For the fiscal second quarter
ended March 31, the San
Mateo, Calif., company
reported a net loss of $4.6
million, or nine cents a diluted
share, compared with a net loss
of $4.8 million, or 13 cents a
share, in the year-ago quarter.
Analysts had forecast a loss of
12 cents.
Revenue, meanwhile, surged to $14.6 million from $3.5
million in the year-ago period.
"We executed on all fronts," said David Peterschmidt,
Inktomi's president and chief executive officer, citing
major customer wins world-wide, a strategic European
alliance for the company's search business and
"continued momentum" for its new shopping engine.
Inktomi said its search engine, used by Web sites to hunt
for data online, processed about 2.2 billion search
queries during the quarter, a 22% increase over the prior
quarter's 1.8 billion queries.
In February, the company entered into a strategic
agreement with British Telecommunications PLC to use
and resell the Inktomi Search Engine services across
Europe, further extending Inktomi's reach into the
European marketplace.
Inktomi signed up eight new search-engine partners
during the quarter, compared with an average of two in
past quarters, Mr. Peterschmidt said.
"It's a very fast-moving business and it's picking up fast," he said.
Growth is coming from newer, specialized
search-engine sites that are filling in the gaps left by
larger search engines, which have evolved into portals
as they broadened other content, he said. Nontechnology
customers are also fueling growth, using Inktomi's
services to quickly establish a Web presence for popular
brands, he said.
Inktomi said it has signed up more than 20 portal and
destination sites for its shopping-engine service. The
service is scheduled for commercial availability in the
current quarter.
In an interview with CNBC Friday, Mr. Peterschmidt
said that the number of portals that have signed up for the
service is "ahead of plan."
Inktomi said its traffic-server network cache moved
from handling one billion requests a day to handling
about 2.6 billion requests a day for America Online
Inc.'s Web traffic. This marks the single largest and most
scalable deployment of caching world-wide, Inktomi
said.
While the adoption of network-caching systems has been
slow, Mr. Peterschmidt said he believes it is just a
matter of time until the technology becomes widespread.
Network caching is used by Internet-service providers
and telecommunications companies to temporarily store
copies of popular sites. This eases congestion because
users access a copy of a site, not the site itself, and sites
that have been cached usually download much faster than
sites accessed directly through the Internet.
Mr. Peterschmidt said companies such as AOL and At
Home Corp. made additional purchases of Inktomi's
network-caching technology three to four months earlier
than expected.
The quarter was a tumultuous one for Inktomi, which
brushed off the loss of Microsoft Corp. as a customer in
January. Inktomi's stock took a beating in January after
Microsoft decided to use Compaq Computer Corp.'s
AltaVista search engine, despite the fact that the move
was triggered by a deal between Microsoft and Compaq,
and not any unhappiness with Inktomi.
Mr. Peterschmidt said he expected analysts to raise
estimates for coming quarters, and at least one said he
would: Rakesh Sood, a Goldman Sachs & Co. analyst,
said he was revising his current estimates of $58 million
in revenue in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, and a loss
of 44 cents a share.
"Obviously the revenues will be higher, the loss will be
lower," Mr. Sood said.
Another analyst, meanwhile, voiced his approval of
Inktomi's overall direction.
"One of the most important metrics that we track is
growth in traffic," said Danny Rimer, a Hambrecht &
Quist Inc. Internet-infrastructure analyst. What's so
fascinating about Inktomi, he added, is that "it gives you
a view of how quickly the Internet is growing. The faster
the Internet grows, the faster they grow |
