Text retrieval company Verity Inc reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $6m including $4.9m charges for the acquisitions of FTP Software Inc ‘s Keyview technology and IBM Corp spinout 64k Inc (CI Nos 3,174, 3,170), compared with a profit of $350,000 last time, on revenue up 11% at $11.1m, compared with $10m last time. Excluding the charges, the Sunnyvale, California-based company would have recorded a loss of $1.2m, more than double expectations of analysts surveyed by First Call. The end of year net loss was $17.9m, including $14.9m of acquisition charges, compared with a loss of $313,000 last fiscal, on revenue up 39% at $42.7m from $30.7m last year, in line with its earlier prediction (CI No 3,176). Excluding the charges for its three acquisitions – it also acquired Cognisoft for $10m back in January (CI No 3,077), Verity would lost $3m, and only missed analysts’ expectations by a small margin. Verity says revenue from sales of software in the fourth quarter totaled $8.8m, up 6% on the $8.3m it did in the fourth quarter of its previous fiscal; software revenue for the year increased 43% to $34.9m compared with $24.5m last time. OEM sales accounted for 30% of revenue this year, it expects that figures to decline to around 20% next fiscal. Verity says it’ll ship version 1.0 of the Intelliserv push technology it acquired with Cognisoft this week, with a 2.0 re six months away. The Keyview filtering technology from FTP will be integrated with its Search’97 kernel by year-end. A Personal Search product will be available by year-end.
