BY JULIE BORT
To the Lakota Indians, the name "Inktomi" summons the legend of a trickster spider that defeats larger adversaries through wit and cunning.
In a Web of a different kind, Inktomi is outwitting its competitors with caching technology, which is slightly more than 6 months old.
Inktomi enters our 10 companies to watch list for its Traffic Server, which has already snared such service providers as America Online, Intermedia Communications' Business Internet and @Home Network. The company also aims the carrier-class gear at big U.S. enterprise companies.
AOL apparently likes what it sees.
"We are always looking to bring the very best Web experience to our members, and Inktomi's Traffic Server really helps us do that," says Wendy Goldberg, vice president of communications for AOL.
In fact, that "best experience" is measurable. In a recent shootout of Web-page speed, AOL led a pack of 28 ISPs with an average time to download of 27.64 seconds. The runner-up, BellSouth, had a download time of 30.43 seconds. Inverse Network Technology, a benchmarking service in Sunnyvale, Calif., conducted the tests.
Traffic Server has this effect thanks to its custom thread- and event-scheduling system and an object database that can cache large numbers of Web objects. Traffic Server supports Cache HTTP 1.1 and is one of the only caching products that supports audio, streaming video, Usenet news and Network News Transfer Protocol content.
Caching is a market ripe for picking, says ISP analyst Greg Howard of the High-tech Resource Consulting Group in San Jose. His research shows that more than half of the country's national ISPs plan to implement caching technology to increase network performance. Their vendor choice? Inktomi, he says.
Inktomi started in the ISP market with its well-regarded outsourced search engine service. At the root of the service is Inktomi's home-grown clustering technology, which aggregates low-cost, off-the-shelf workstations and PCs into a massive parallel computer.
Traffic Server grew out of Inktomi's clustering experience because caching requires knowledge of the Internet, traffic volumes and parallel computing.
Enterprise ahead
Inktomi is using Traffic Server to attack the global enterprise market, particularly companies with their own carrier-class, mission-critical networks. It is, therefore, selling the product via a traditional software licensing model, in which price is negotiated case by case, says Paul Gauthier, chief technology officer and co-founder of Inktomi.
The business plan may prove to be a winner, too. As of fourth-quarter 1998, Inktomi has been generating roughly half of its revenue through Traffic Server, with the remainder coming from its outsourced search engine services. Better still, revenue is growing at a rate of 343%, to $20.4 million, according to the company's last quarterly statement, released in January. And Inktomi has been a darling of Wall Street in the past year, despite consistent losses.
Next up for Inktomi is shopping search engine services that the company will outsource to its portal customers in the same manner it outsources Web page queries. CNNfn.com has already signed up for the service for its newly launched CNNfn Power Shopper.
To the Lakota Indians, the name "Inktomi" summons the legend of a trickster spider that defeats larger adversaries through wit and cunning.
In a Web of a different kind, Inktomi is outwitting its competitors with caching technology, which is slightly more than 6 months old.
Inktomi enters our 10 companies to watch list for its Traffic Server, which has already snared such service providers as America Online, Intermedia Communications' Business Internet and @Home Network. The company also aims the carrier-class gear at big U.S. enterprise companies.
AOL apparently likes what it sees.
"We are always looking to bring the very best Web experience to our members, and Inktomi's Traffic Server really helps us do that," says Wendy Goldberg, vice president of communications for AOL.
In fact, that "best experience" is measurable. In a recent shootout of Web-page speed, AOL led a pack of 28 ISPs with an average time to download of 27.64 seconds. The runner-up, BellSouth, had a download time of 30.43 seconds. Inverse Network Technology, a benchmarking service in Sunnyvale, Calif., conducted the tests.
Traffic Server has this effect thanks to its custom thread- and event-scheduling system and an object database that can cache large numbers of Web objects. Traffic Server supports Cache HTTP 1.1 and is one of the only caching products that supports audio, streaming video, Usenet news and Network News Transfer Protocol content.
Caching is a market ripe for picking, says ISP analyst Greg Howard of the High-tech Resource Consulting Group in San Jose. His research shows that more than half of the country's national ISPs plan to implement caching technology to increase network performance. Their vendor choice? Inktomi, he says.
Inktomi started in the ISP market with its well-regarded outsourced search engine service. At the root of the service is Inktomi's home-grown clustering technology, which aggregates low-cost, off-the-shelf workstations and PCs into a massive parallel computer.
Traffic Server grew out of Inktomi's clustering experience because caching requires knowledge of the Internet, traffic volumes and parallel computing.
Enterprise ahead
Inktomi is using Traffic Server to attack the global enterprise market, particularly companies with their own carrier-class, mission-critical networks. It is, therefore, selling the product via a traditional software licensing model, in which price is negotiated case by case, says Paul Gauthier, chief technology officer and co-founder of Inktomi.
The business plan may prove to be a winner, too. As of fourth-quarter 1998, Inktomi has been generating roughly half of its revenue through Traffic Server, with the remainder coming from its outsourced search engine services. Better still, revenue is growing at a rate of 343%, to $20.4 million, according to the company's last quarterly statement, released in January. And Inktomi has been a darling of Wall Street in the past year, despite consistent losses.
Next up for Inktomi is shopping search engine services that the company will outsource to its portal customers in the same manner it outsources Web page queries. CNNfn.com has already signed up for the service for its newly launched CNNfn Power Shopper.