Inktomi's directions

I spoke with Inktomi recently about where that company's business strategy is heading. Inktomi has two primary focus areas: content delivery network (CDN) technology - mainly caching - and, of course, its search software that powers a lot of Web sites' engines under the covers.

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In both areas, the company has a lot to say about enterprise users. It's no secret that the service provider market has been a faded rose of late, so Inktomi, its partners and its competitors have taken a refreshed look at the enterprise user. If you were feeling lonely, enterprise user, you're back in the limelight.

Inktomi's approach to search software for the enterprise may have some new draws for corporate users this coming year, particularly for users that want to make searching more meaningful and application-focused. The idea isn't completely new, but the company has the resources to potentially form some alliances that could help corporate users make data more reusable and, more importantly, easily located.

Another area I spoke to Inktomi about is using enterprise CDN technology to cut bandwidth costs and travel costs, and help solve the very real problems global companies have with training. By putting a corporate CDN in place and using cache technology intelligently, users can shave network costs. Inktomi tried out its own version of a webcast for employees recently - an event for which they normally would have flown people in from remote areas - and reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost savings as a result. I'll indulge in a little jargon-speak here: It was a rich media experience that combined voice, video and data, and live interaction.

Besides travel costs, Inktomi suggests that users can shave bandwidth costs by caching content at low-demand times and using local caches to distribute that content with access controls so that it is seen only when appropriate. Again, distributing a single stream long-distance is a lot cheaper than doing it hundreds of times at peak-demand period.

April Jacobs is a Senior Writer with Network World. If you have any comments or questions on this or other Web Acceleration newsletters, e-mail April at aprilj@nww.com.