FTP Software Inc, the virtual IP and TCP/IP networking company warned yesterday that its second quarter results will fall substantially below the company’s internal goals. The company recently sold its KeyView viewing and filtering unit to Verity Inc, after the KeyView people claimed it was left to rot inside FTP. Such slimming-down had been expected from FTP (CI No 3,112), but this is the second quarter in a row the company has had to issue a profit warning. After the first quarter results the company announced that it did not expect to hit its internal 25% to 30% revenue growth from the $101m sales the company did last year. Chief financial officer since April Jim Tholen would not talk about the current quarter’s numbers yesterday, but prior to the announcement. First Call was predicting second quarter losses of $0.25 per share, down from $0.33 per share reported in the first quarter. FTP is reorganizing into three business units: the Agent/Directory Management unit, the VIP Network Applications unit and the IP Technology unit and expects the reorganization to take place within 60 days. Mordecai Rosen will serve as acting president of the first unit having been VP corporate development since he joined earlier this year. Dennis Leibl joins the company from Vignette to head the VIP unit, and John Kimberley will be acting president of the IP Technology group. All report to chairman and chief executive Glenn Hazard. The Agent/Directory group will concentrate on the company’s Java agent and directory applications, the first two of which, IP Auditor and IP Distributor were launched at Networld+Interop in May (CI No 3,149). The VIP Network group will focus in the company’s Network Access suite and On Net products, and will also introduce products that address the thin client and network computing markets over the next 12 months. Part of this will be taking IBM’s terminal emulation technology and introducing web-to-host connectivity. Tholen said the IBM partnership is not affected by this move and the three units comprise all the FTP products. FTP is also TCP/IP into IBM’s 18- year-old SNA Systems Network Architecture. That work would fall under the remit of the third FTP division that will sell the company’s set of the IP client and server gateways and products.
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