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Inktomi 'caches' in
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April 18, 2000: 5:59 p.m. ET
Company's second-quarter sales boom on rising demand for Web solutions
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Inktomi, the provider of Web services such as search and shopping engines, swung to a profit in the second quarter that beat estimates and was boosted by sales of cyber traffic server solutions.
The company, which counts AOL (AOL: Research, Estimates) and Excite@Home among its customers, posted net profit of $1 million, or 1 cent a share, compared to a loss of $7.4 million, or 7 cents per share in period a year earlier. Analysts polled by First Call expected a loss of 2 cents per share. Sales rose threefold to $47.3 million.
Demand from Internet users for quick downloading sites has been a boom for the Foster City, Calif.-based company, which has seen a surge in sales for it "caching" products from Internet service providers. Caching makes Web traffic faster by storing frequently used sites across a number of network servers.
The company consolidated "our leadership in the search and network products arena, gained further traction with our commerce engine and extended our technology position in the industry," said David Peterschmidt, chief executive of Inktomi (INKT: Research, Estimates).
Inktomi's network products business, consisting of traffic server and content distribution services, contributed $30.8 million to sales, an increase of 250 percent on the year earlier period. Its portal services business generated sales of $16.5 million, an increase of 157 percent, while search and directory business sales doubled to $12.7 million.
 During the second quarter, the company's search engine processed a staggering 4.2 billion search queries, an increase of about 91 percent on the same period a year earlier.
Inktomi has also been aggressively signing up partnerships across the world to deliver its services to wireless markets. Access to the Internet through wireless phones is expected to rocket over the next several years. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association projects that in five years, 830 million wireless devices will be active globally to access the Internet.
Shares of Inktomi rose 24 to close at 116 Tuesday. Earnings were announced after the markets closed. 
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Inktomi
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