Inktomi Corporation was a
CaliforniaCalifornia is the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
company that provided software for
Internet service providerAn Internet service provider is a company that offers its customers access to the Internet...
s. It was founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley professor
Eric BrewerEric A. Brewer is a former billionaire and main inventor of a wireless networking scheme called WiLDNet which promises to bring low-cost connectivity to rural areas of the developing world. He also was made a tenured professor at UC Berkeley at the age of 32. In 1996, Brewer co-founded Inktomi...
and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The company was initially founded based on the real-world success of the
search engineA web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data...
they developed at the university. After the bursting of the
dot-com bubbleThe "dot-com bubble" was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1998–2001 during which stock markets in Western nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more recent Internet sector and related fields...
, Inktomi was acquired by
Yahoo!Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, , that provides Internet services worldwide...
Inktomi's software was incorporated in the widely-used
HotBotHotBot is one of the early Internet search engines and was launched in May 1996 as a service of Wired Magazine. It was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to update its search database more often than its competitors. It also offered free webpage hosting, but only for a...
search engine, which displaced
AltaVistaAltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity has waned with the rise of Google.-Origins:...
as the leading web-crawler-based search engine, and which was in turn displaced by
GoogleGoogle Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. Google has also...
.
Inktomi Corporation was a
CaliforniaCalifornia is the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
company that provided software for
Internet service providerAn Internet service provider is a company that offers its customers access to the Internet...
s. It was founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley professor
Eric BrewerEric A. Brewer is a former billionaire and main inventor of a wireless networking scheme called WiLDNet which promises to bring low-cost connectivity to rural areas of the developing world. He also was made a tenured professor at UC Berkeley at the age of 32. In 1996, Brewer co-founded Inktomi...
and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The company was initially founded based on the real-world success of the
search engineA web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data...
they developed at the university. After the bursting of the
dot-com bubbleThe "dot-com bubble" was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1998–2001 during which stock markets in Western nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more recent Internet sector and related fields...
, Inktomi was acquired by
Yahoo!Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, , that provides Internet services worldwide...
History
Inktomi's software was incorporated in the widely-used
HotBotHotBot is one of the early Internet search engines and was launched in May 1996 as a service of Wired Magazine. It was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to update its search database more often than its competitors. It also offered free webpage hosting, but only for a...
search engine, which displaced
AltaVistaAltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity has waned with the rise of Google.-Origins:...
as the leading web-crawler-based search engine, and which was in turn displaced by
GoogleGoogle Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. Google has also...
. In a talk given to a UC Berkeley seminar on Search Engines in October 2005, Eric Brewer credited much of the AltaVista displacement to technical differences of scale.
The company went on to develop Traffic Server, a
proxyIn computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource, available from a different server...
cacheWeb caching is the caching of web documents to reduce bandwidth usage, server load, and perceived lag. A web cache stores copies of documents passing through it; subsequent requests may be satisfied from the cache if certain conditions are met.It should not to be confused with a web archive, a...
for
webThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks...
traffic and on-demand
streaming mediaStreaming media are multimedia that are constantly received by, and normally presented to, an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider . The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather than to the medium itself...
. Traffic Server found a limited marketplace due to several factors, but was deployed by several large service providers including
AOLAmerica Online, LLC is an American global Internet services and media company operated by Time Warner. It is headquartered at 770 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City...
. In November 1999 Inktomi acquired Webspective; in August 2000 Inktomi acquired Ultraseek Server from
DisneyThe Walt Disney Company , often simply known as Disney, is the largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world, known for its family-friendly products...
's
Go.comGo.com is a web portal first launched by Jeff Gold, and now operated by the Walt Disney Internet Group, which is a part of The Walt Disney Company. The portal includes content from ABC News, ESPN, and FamilyFun.com, all of which are associated with Disney and are hosted under a .go.com name...
; in September, 2000, Inktomi acquired FastForward Networks; in December 2000, Inktomi acquired the Content Bridge Business Unit from Adero, a content delivery network, which had formed the Content Bridge Alliance with Inktomi, AOL and a number of other ISPs, hosting providers and IP transport providers; and in June 2001 Inktomi acquired eScene Networks. Webspective developed technology for synchronizing and managing content across a host of distributed servers to be used in clustered or distributed load-balancing. Fast Forward developed software for the distribution of live streaming media over the Internet using "app-level" multicast technology. eScene Networks developed software that provided an integrated workflow for the management and publishing of video content (now owned by Media Publisher, Inc.). With this combination of technologies, Inktomi became an "arms merchant" to a growing number of
Content Delivery NetworkA content delivery network or content distribution network is asystem of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as tomaximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network...
(CDN) service providers. Inktomi stock peaked with a split-adjusted price of $241 a share in March 2000.
In earlier acquisitions Inktomi acquired C2B and Impulse Buy Networks, both companies which had pioneered the comparison shopping space and that had pioneered the performance based marketing market. With over 4 million products registered in the service in 1998, and serving millions of merchandise product offers daily across 20,000 websites including Yahoo!,
MSNMSN, formerly The Microsoft Network, is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.The range of services...
, and AOL shopping. Merchants paid a percentage of sales and or a cost per click for traffic sent to their websites, ultimately this model became known as
pay per clickPay per click is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market...
and was perfected by Google and Overture Services, Inc..
With the financial collapse of the service provider industry and overall burst of the
dot-com bubbleThe "dot-com bubble" was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1998–2001 during which stock markets in Western nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more recent Internet sector and related fields...
, Inktomi lost most of its customer base and ultimately was acquired by
Yahoo!Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, , that provides Internet services worldwide...
in 2002 for $1.63 a share (or $235 million). In a separate transaction, the Ultraseek Server product (renamed Inktomi Enterprise Search) was sold to competitor Verity, Inc. in late 2002.
In 2006, the technology behind the Inktomi Proxy Server was acquired by
WebsenseWebsense is a San Diego-based company specializing in Web security gateway software. It enables clients to block access to chosen categories of website. It has come under criticism from civil liberties groups on the grounds that it assists repressive regimes to restrict freedom of...
, which has modified it and included it their Websense Security Gateway solution.
It has been proposed to create an Apache top level project to Open Source the existing Yahoo! Traffic Server code.
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/TrafficServerProposal
Acquisitions
In September 1998 Inktomi acquired C2B Technologies , adding a shopping engine technology to its portfolio; ; In April 1999 Inktomi acquired Impulse Buy Network, adding 400 merchants to its shopping engine and performance based business shopping model. http://news.cnet.com/Inktomi-buys-Impulse-Buy/2100-1017_3-224817.html ; in November 1999 Inktomi acquired Webspective; in August 2000 Inktomi acquired Ultraseek Server from
DisneyThe Walt Disney Company , often simply known as Disney, is the largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world, known for its family-friendly products...
's
Go.comGo.com is a web portal first launched by Jeff Gold, and now operated by the Walt Disney Internet Group, which is a part of The Walt Disney Company. The portal includes content from ABC News, ESPN, and FamilyFun.com, all of which are associated with Disney and are hosted under a .go.com name...
; in September, 2000, Inktomi acquired FastForward Networks; in December 2000, Inktomi acquired the Content Bridge Business Unit from Adero, a content delivery network, which had formed the Content Bridge Alliance with Inktomi, AOL and a number of other ISPs, hosting providers and IP transport providers; and in June 2001 Inktomi acquired eScene Networks. Webspective developed technology for synchronizing and managing content across a host of distributed servers to be used in clustered or distributed load-balancing. Fast Forward developed software for the distribution of live streaming media over the Internet using "app-level" multicast technology. eScene Networks developed software that provided an integrated workflow for the management and publishing of video content (now owned by Media Publisher, Inc.). With this combination of technologies, Inktomi became an "arms merchant" to a growing number of
Content Delivery NetworkA content delivery network or content distribution network is asystem of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as tomaximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network...
(CDN) service providers. Inktomi stock peaked with a split-adjusted price of $241 a share in March 2000.
Inktomi name and logo
According to the Inktomi website, "The company's name, pronounced 'INK-tuh-me', is derived from a Lakota Indian legend about a trickster spider character.
IktomiIn Lakota mythology, Iktomi is a spider-trickster spirit, and a culture hero for the Lakota people. Alternate names for Iktomi include Ikto, Ictinike, Inktomi, Unktome, and Unktomi...
is known for his ability to defeat larger adversaries through wit and cunning." The tri-color, nested cube logo was created by Tom Lamar in 1996.
Corporate officers
- David C. Peterschmidt – Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
- Dr. Eric A. Brewer – Chief Scientist
- Timothy J. Burch – Vice President of Human Resources
- Ted Hally – Senior Vice President and General Manager of Network Products
- Jerry M. Kennelly – Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary
- Al Shipp – Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations
- Timothy Stevens – Senior Vice President of Business Affairs, General Counsel and Assistant Secretary
- Steve Hill – Vice President of Europe
Board of directors
- David C. Peterschmidt – Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Inktomi Corporation
- Dr. Eric A. Brewer – Chief Scientist, Inktomi Corporation
- Frank Gill Retired – Executive Vice President, Intel Corporation
Intel is the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. The company is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, as Integrated Electronics Corporation and based in Santa Clara,...
- Fredric W. Harman – General Partner, Oak Investment Partners
Oak Investment Partners is a private equity firm focusing on venture capital investments in companies developing communications systems, information technology, new Internet media, healthcare services and retail....
- Alan F. Shugart – Chief Executive Officer, Al Shugart International
Mission statement
"The Inktomi mission is to build scalable software applications that are core to the Internet infrastructure."