Search engine and caching technology provider Inktomi Corp reported strong second-quarter results, with revenue of $14.6m – a more than four-fold increase over the year-ago quarter’s $3.5m and a 36% sequential increase. The bottom line showed a lower- than-expected loss of $4.6m, or $0.09 per share, where analysts surveyed by First Call were expecting a loss of $0.12. The loss in the year-ago quarter was $4.8m.
Portal services revenue rose 126% year-over-year and 23% sequentially to $6.4m and represented 44% of total revenue. The network products business, meanwhile, saw $8.2m in sales, which represented 49% growth from the previous quarter.
The company says its search engine processed 2.2 billion search queries during the quarter, a 22% increase over the prior quarter’s 1.8 billion. Eight new search engine customers went live in the quarter, including BellSouth Corp and Yahoo! Japan Inc, in addition to the deal with British Telecom, which will use and resell the search services throughout Europe. The company has also signed up 20 portals for its shopping engine, which Inktomi said will be commercially available this quarter and have its functionality enhanced over the next several months.
On the network products side of the business, Inktomi said its Traffic Server network cache product won 10 new customers during the quarter and is now becoming mission-critical to the world’s largest internet businesses. The company claims that within a 60-day period Traffic Server moved from handling one billion requests a day for America Online Inc to handling more than 2.5 billion requests a day.
Looking ahead, Inktomi promises to break out numbers for its newly-formed services business, something it declined to do this quarter, although the company insisted the business was off to a strong start. Also promised this quarter is the introduction of a fourth application, although the company would not elaborate on what it might be. It said only that the new offering will join the search and shopping engines on the portal services side of the business and will be very complementary to them.
For the six-month period, Inktomi posted a net loss of $10.4m on revenue of $25.3m, against a loss of $9.2m on revenue of $5.9m. á
